{"id":5547,"date":"2013-04-14T12:07:03","date_gmt":"2013-04-14T12:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5547"},"modified":"2020-08-09T09:21:33","modified_gmt":"2020-08-09T09:21:33","slug":"pkom-at-the-wigmore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/pkom-at-the-wigmore\/","title":{"rendered":"PKOM at the Wigmore"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I was lucky to catch the first half of a concert by Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto and pianist\/composer Olli Mustonen at London’s Wigmore Hall.\u00a0\u00a0 I heard them play Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A<\/em> (Op. 30, #1) and Mustonen’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, <\/em>which was a world premiere.<\/p>\n

As always with PK, the playing was superb and full of energy.\u00a0\u00a0 What he lacks in physical height, he more than makes up for in\u00a0enthusiasm and pizzaz.\u00a0 He is an extraordinarily talented violinist, and I try not to miss opportunities to hear him play.\u00a0 (I have also heard him play piano<\/a>, but the part was not a testing one.)<\/p>\n

In the main, Beethoven’s violin sonatas do not impress me – our Ludwig couldn’t play the instrument nearly as well as he could play the piano, and this shows in his writing for the respective instruments.\u00a0 I view these sonatas as really being piano sonatas with violin commentaries.\u00a0 And, as so often with Beethoven, the music at some point comes to a stop, or nearly so, mid-way through the develoment section, like a clock winding down, and has to be re-started again.\u00a0 What underlying psychological thing is going on here, I wonder, that this happens so often in B’s music?\u00a0 After a while it becomes annoying, like a friend asking you the same unpleasant question every time you meet, and you end up wantIng to avoid talking with that person.<\/p>\n

Mustonen’s Sonata<\/em> was superb.\u00a0 The programme notes warned us that he began as a composer of “Busonian neo-classicism”.\u00a0\u00a0 I thought this piece was not at all neo-classical, but also certainly not in the category of up-town modernist complexity.\u00a0 The first part comprised an ever-present walking treble line\u00a0of odd intervals by the violin, sequences of uneven lengths and different intervals not quite repeated exactly, with various waves of piano arising and decaying around this.\u00a0\u00a0 The particular odd intervals – tritones, sevenths – brought immediately to my mind some music of Australian composer Larry Sitsky, who studied with Egon Petri (1881-1962), who in turn was a student of\u00a0Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The emotional waves of this first part were very stark.\u00a0 Would I have thought of Sibelius\u00a0and the forests of the\u00a0North if I had not known the composer was Finnish?\u00a0 I don’t know.<\/p>\n

The transition between the second and third parts was slow and beautiful, and very moving, and the effects\u00a0PK produced were simply stunning.\u00a0 At one point, low trembling notes\u00a0on the G string sounded like a breathy flute being played.\u00a0 And a series of repeated patterns combining trills and vibrata on different fingers of the left hand, was very impressive.\u00a0 Not at all clear how these effects were produced, but the independent but co-ordinated action of the left-hand fingers would have required long practice to achieve.\u00a0 Perhaps the effect was partly due to rapid changes of speed and pressure on the bow, also.<\/p>\n

It was a privilege to be in the presence of such superb music played by these two virtuosos.<\/p>\n

Here<\/a> is another review of the same concert, by an anonymous blogger.\u00a0\u00a0 Following the review, the blogger cites PK’s recording of Vivalid’s Four Seasons<\/em>, as “restrained”.\u00a0\u00a0 I wonder if he or she was actually listening!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We’ve had 60 years of elegant, effete and twee recordings of The Seasons, so we know what restrained with regard to this music means.\u00a0 PK’s treatment is rustic and earthy and full-blooded, as if the entire ensemble had been taken outside and roughed-up in the mud of the farmyard, and the complete opposite of restrained!\u00a0\u00a0 A simply superb interpretation, original, fresh and compelling.\u00a0 Your milage certainly can vary, as people say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, I was lucky to catch the first half of a concert by Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto and pianist\/composer Olli Mustonen at London’s Wigmore Hall.\u00a0\u00a0 I heard them play Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A (Op. 30, #1) and Mustonen’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, which was a world premiere. As always with PK, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,56,83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concerts","category-music","category-violin","p1","y2013","m04","d14","h12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5547"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9993,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5547\/revisions\/9993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}