CRITICS / MADRID / OCNE: recycling music, by Tomás Marco

MADRID / OCNE: recycling music

Madrid. National Auditorium (Symphonic Hall). 18-III-2022. Ana Maria Valderrama, violin. National Orchestra of Spain. Director: Pablo Gonzalez. Works by Núñez Hierro, Wieniawski and Mahler.

The continuous recycling of materials and procedures is something that has often characterized the musical composition of any era, and this program of the OCNE cycle offered three examples of it (four, with the tip). Previously, the Aria from Suite in Re by Bach remembered the victims of the Ukrainian war.

The Jerez resident in Berlin, Nuria Núñez Hierro (1980), premiered a commissioned work entitled Umvollendete Wege (Unfinished Roads), very much in line with the current sound research being carried out in Central Europe. Núñez handles the orchestra as if it were a group of a type similar to a swarm of bees or a flock of birds, in a work of profound search for timbre that combines today’s techniques with the recycling of materials that are very typical of the avant-garde of the sixties and seventies of the last century. Thus, the strings in the line of the Polish school of those years, or the presence of non-symphonic instruments, such as the kazoos that composers like David Bedford used so profusely, or the music boxes so expensive to Aldo Clementi. But here the recycled takes on a new look; the work proceeds with naturalness and compositional logic, and towards the end the personality that the composer undoubtedly possesses ends up imposing itself, making the work very well received.

A very clear nineteenth-century recycling is the Concerto No. 2 in D minor Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski. He wrote it for another virtuoso, Pablo Sarasate, who contributed a lot to its diffusion. His technique and style depend so much on recycling that the work seems like a cut and paste of the music of the time, uniting echoes of an early romanticism (Weberian and Mendelssohnian, to understand us) to a certain French influence of Reicha’s followers, under the inevitable shadow of Paganini. Today the work feels like a dusty relic of B-series romanticism, but its solo writing is extraordinarily difficult and lends itself to display. Ana María Valderrama has more than proven her great worth as an international soloist, and if the work is less close to that beautiful sound that already has its solvency in sonorous expressiveness, instead it shows that she has a dazzling technique that she develops spectacularly, justly capturing to the public.

Interesting for the issue of recycling that concerns us was the tip, which the soloist offered accompanied by a string quintet taken from the orchestra (by the way, excellent). It was a klezmer, a type of Ashkenazi Jewish folk composition, in this case the piece titled Let’s be happy by the Argentinian of Bessarabian origin Giora Feidman, arranged by the Swiss Reto Bieri. Music more spectacular than good, it obtained a dazzling and acclaimed execution.

The great recycler of post-romanticism was Mahler, who developed his great symphonic constructions by absorbing everything made in his time and returning it as great and genuine music. An illustrious example is the Symphony No. 1 in D majorperhaps the most played of his, which at first recycles his own lieder, then the essence of the ländler and even mounts a huge sound artifact from a simple popular theme such as the Brother Martin (Brother James for Francophones) to advance in the final sound orgy beyond Wagner or Bruckner. From an interpretive point of view, it is not easy to conceptually unite all these materials, but Pablo González, an excellent director who is currently the head of the RTVE Orchestra and who on this occasion was performing as a guest of ONE, succeeded. González carefully staged the premiere, irreproachably accompanied the concert and demonstrated in the symphony his musical ability and his technical mastery in one of the greatest works of the symphonic repertoire. ONE responded wonderfully well to the challenges, resulting in a varied and very well-executed concert that also brought us back, two years later, to a formation that bordered on a hundred teachers. We normalize. Let’s see if it lasts.

Thomas Mark

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