It was an evening of revelations. More recently, I’d given up hoping that a pianist would bring Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 closer to the inherent stormy turbulence that it shares with the composer’s symphony in the same key. Too many interpreters have over-emphasised the connections with Mozart’s C minor concerto. Instead of poise, restraint and good manners, here we had Beethoven in his iconic gruff mood, hewing the melodic fragments and rhythmic sallies from huge blocks of granite, bristling with pent-up energy, the ruffian standing on the stair in defiant and dogged determination.
This was a surprise, given that the soloist Rudolf Buchbinder, partnered by the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Paavo Järvi, is on the record as saying that the three most important things in piano playing are dolce, cantabile and espressivo. There was no shortage of those qualities in the central Largo, where Buchbinder took his listeners into the ethereal world of Beethoven’s final piano sonata, also in C minor. One memorable point came where the soloist duets first with bassoon and then flute, recollections of the tempestuous first movement now quite distant. How arresting that had been, with a highly-charged opening statement from Buchbinder, sympathetically matched by Järvi throughout, and a woodwind choir speaking of assault and battery. Buchbinder tore into the cadenza, the left hand challenging the right for domination of the keyboard, his rippling arpeggios flying like arrows through the air. He ended it very softly, with perfectly-placed trills, the hard-sticked timpani reintroducing the martial tone, but then blending with the orchestra to create a breathtaking episode of suspense.
At just under 33 minutes, this was a barnstorming reading, imbued with revolutionary spirit, not stinting on gravitas or lyricism, yet in the unvarnished acoustics of this hall, with little warmth of its own, the musical terrain was made to sound craggy and raw, the composer in full Sturm und Drang mode. To top it all, Buchbinder’s generous encore, the Finale of Beethoven’s Tempest sonata, picked up the earlier demonic touches, all the D minor thorns exposed, before the final falling chromatic scale was tossed off insouciantly like a silken cape.
The EFO remains a fabulous ambassador for the international language which music represents, given that it is graced by outstanding players from Estonia and the wider international community. Its strings in particular can purr along just above the striations of audibility, only to unleash a mighty and muscular roar, both extremes much in evidence in the two short works framing the two longer ones. Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Invocation of Tempest (and how apt that title was in the context of the concert as a whole), written primarily as an encore but equally effective as a curtain-raiser, and Arvo Pärt’s Da pacem Domine, a tribute to the loss of life in the Madrid bombings, meditative and hypnotic, acting as an isle of tranquillity before the main work.
Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony was itself revolutionary in the way it eschewed the weighty traditions tied to Germanic symphonic thinking. Yet it was not the dream-like, poetic impressionism that stood out for me so much as the sheer teeming energy Järvi found in this music. In the development section of the first movement he produced a whirlwind of sound from his superb strings, mirroring the earlier tempest of the concerto. The second movement offered exquisite moments of reflection such as the invocation of icy wastes in oboe and flute solos, followed by the bassoon, above susurrating strings. Not the least of insights came in the Finale, with ominous strings, lamenting horns and plangent woodwind foreshadowing the desolation of the Pathétique.
