I suspect that Christoph Koncz may be one of those conductors who likes to rehearse his programmes in reverse order. In last night’s concert, at the Église Saint-Matthieu in Colmar, the Orchestre National de Mulhouse started unpromisingly with a somewhat muddy opening to Weber’s overture to Der Freischütz, and then got steadily better through the piece and then the rest of the programme, ending with a Dvořák Eighth Symphony full of colour and vivid dance rhythms.
Koncz is coming to the end of a three year stint as the orchestra’s Music Director, which gives every sign of having been very successful. His conducting style is compact and precise, his instructions to different sections (whether facial or gestural) could not be clearer, and the resulting blend of sound is well beyond the level you might reasonably expect from a regional orchestra. It was particularly noticeable in the passages where Dvořák blends the strings with horns or other combinations of wind instruments: the different orchestral sections were so perfectly in sync that you felt like you were listening to a new, hybrid instrument.
Koncz was sure-footed in his choices of tempi and phrasing. The second movement showed wonderful levels of swell, clarity in the separation of orchestral voices and perfectly voiced passages both at pianissimo (hats off to the double basses) and at fortissimo (some blazing brass entries). Personally, I would have asked for a bit more romantic swoop in the three-time dance that is the third movement, although some would accuse me of kitsch.
The orchestra were joined by Trio Wanderer for Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C major. Opening whisper-soft horn entries set the scene for a progression through heroism to a joyful conclusion. The work has fascinating interplay between soloists and joint passages for soloists and different orchestral sections, and this fascination was brought out fully. My principal point of criticism is that pianist Vincent Coq often seemed somewhat isolated from his trio colleagues, whereas violinist Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian and cellist Raphaël Pidoux were obviously tightly in sync with each other.
This concert brought our three days in Colmar to a close, which proved the city and the festival to be well worth the visit. The medieval architecture of the old part of the city contains many attractive half-timbered buildings, somewhat Germanic in style (unsurprisingly for this city so near the border). There’s a photogenic network of canals which gives its part of the city the tag of “Little Venice”. And there’s an inexhaustible choice of places to eat and drink – Colmar is at the epicentre of the Alsace wine-growing region.
The genial Alain Altinoglu is omnipresent at the festival. He arranges it according to a set daily pattern: a 12:30 concert, mostly for younger musicians, in the Kofhuis (aka Ancienne Douane, the attractively half-timbered 15th-century customs house), an 18:00 concert in the Théâtre Municipal for more established artists, and the headline concert at 20:30 in the Église Saint Matthieu with more storied international stars. I attended one 12:30 concert, a piano trio formed from three young artists sponsored by the Gautier Capuçon Foundation. Considering that these three artists were playing together for the first time, their togetherness and musicality were impressive; the Brahms Piano Trio no.1 is a piece that I know intimately and their performance was thoroughly satisfying. Of the three, cellist Shicong Li struck me most as a talent worth watching, both for the sound he produced and for his stage presence – utterly committed to the music and communicating it to the audience, while always alert both to the other members of the trio. In the preceding day’s 18:00 concert, in the less architecturally attractive but extremely comfortable Théâtre Municipal, the all-female Quatuor Akilone made a strong case for Fanny Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E flat major and its thrilling levels of invention.
It’s been a great stay. I’m only sad to be missing Sunday’s Colmar Symphonic Mob, where Altinoglu and the Orchestre National de Mulhouse invite amateur musicians – 500 of them, apparently – to bring their scores along to the city’s Champ de Mars and join them.
David’s stay in Colmar was funded by the Festival International de Colmar.
