There were times during last Friday’s Istanbul Music Festival concert, featuring the Festival Strings Lucerne, when it was tempting just to curl up and take a nap. That’s not to suggest the performance was boring but, rather, due to the extent to which they conjured up an idyllic world of calm and quietude.
They established this in quite remarkable fashion, reconfiguring the opening sequence of Honegger’s Pastorale d'été – the composer at his most genteel and unassuming – as if it were a piece of ambient music. As such, the music didn’t so much progress as seem to slowly rotate on its axis, creating an atmosphere of harmonic stasis with Eno-like, continually shifting permutations of ideas. In this context the work’s middle episode served as a playful excursion, more tangible and alert, before returning back to the broad, all-enveloping environment of stillness and eternal reverie.
One couldn’t help wondering if, having been listening to the Honegger from the wings, the performance had had a significant effect on Maria João Pires. In almost every respect, her account of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto was little more than functional, with plenty of technical prowess but little else. As far as the Festival Strings Lucerne were concerned, they were sleek, clean, the very epitome of Classicism. Pires, one assumed, would be the counterpart to this: playful, colourful, the distinct personality projected onto their pristine backdrop. Yet she barely extruded herself beyond them, dynamically limited to the extent that she was often hard to make out in the busier passages, and utterly neutral when the orchestra fell back.
The effect was exacerbated in the middle movement, as if everyone had taken a chill pill in a truly soporific Largo, featuring rather too many glaring wrong notes from Pires. Following this snoozefest, the liveliness of the closing Rondo almost sounded as if it were happening under duress, lacklustre and half-hearted. To be fair, the orchestra was clearly giving it all they could, but this was effectively cancelled out by Pires, passionless to the last.
Lucerne were capable of a great deal more when left to their own devices in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. They once again returned to the clean Classical lines they had articulated in the concerto, lithe, supple and spritely, with especially fine clarity of cross-rhythms and textural inner details. Yet, was it all too clean? Were Beethoven’s assorted pastoralia just a bit too pristine and, as a consequence, somewhat hyperreal? (In one respect they were undoubtedly very realistic: a local cat, which had been roaming the concert hall all evening, was drawn onto the stage, attracted by the sequence of woodwind bird calls!) The performance felt less plastic as it progressed, turning demonstrably playful in the central Merry gathering of country folk – particularly one rather rogue bassoonist – energetically playing up the folk dancing with gusto. Furthermore, the prevailing laid-back lethargy from elsewhere only made the fourth movement more threateningly fiery.
An especially nice touch was the way they presented the gentle final movement. Not only was the transition back to lyrical music beautifully effective, but Lucerne also managed to recapture something of the riveting, rotating ambient-esque moodscape of the Honegger, bringing the concert full circle, back to a sleepy place of rest and repose.
Simon’s press trip was funded by the Istanbul Music Festival.
