SANTANDER / The illusion of music
Santander. Palace of Festivals. 21-V-2022. Miguel Cerezo and Vicent Olmos, trumpets. “Llíria, City of Music” Orchestra. Director: Vicent Pelechano. Works by Vivaldi, Haydn and Mozart.
Among the most emerging, dynamic and restless conductors of the new generation of Valencian musicians, Vicent Pelechano (Alfarp, 1979) occupies a place of honor. Not only for his merits as a promoter and soul of a thousand and one artistic initiatives, but, above all, for his strict performance on the podium. On Saturday, at the Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria, he made it clear before a high-risk program, in which after the always welcome music of Vivaldi —today so ignored in symphonic programming—, the geniuses of Haydn and Beethoven arrived twinned. From the first, the great and veteran Symphony 104, “London”; of the second, the young and still classic second symphonywhich the Colossus of Bonn composed just seven years later, between 1801 and 1802.
The last Haydn and the first Beethoven. On the threshold of Classicism, at the gates of Romanticism. The cultured and sensitive musician who is the current chief conductor of the Menéndez Pelayo International University Symphony Orchestra and the Santander Municipal Band, placed both symphonies at that crucial point in the history of music and art in general. He underlined the most classical and transparent nuances of both, singing and charging the Minuet of Haydn’s symphony and the already Scherzo of Beethoven’s with pulse and beat. There was lyricism, popular aromas and, also, that instrumental refinement that distinguishes both scores so much.
Haydn, so mistakenly overshadowed by Mozart, signs on his London Symphony one of the key pages of the genre. Pelechano treated her with expressive ambition; he let his four movements breathe and energized them and calibrated them with careful emphasis, as he did in the nuanced slow introduction, in D minor, in which he had the wisdom to underline the double dots without demagoguery. Also remarkable is the grace and lightness that he imprinted on the parodic trio, with its evident confluence with the Like this Mozartian and his “medicinal” trills.
The “Llíria, Ciutat de la Música” Orchestra, which had numerous guest teachers among its music stands, became, thanks to the invited hand of maestro alrbino, the best ambassador of a city in which music is as essential as breathing and to live. Occasional mismatches and inaccuracies failed to dampen the show’s appeal. After the luminous Haydn of the London Symphonythe Second by Beethoven is perceived and enjoyed with amazing naturalness, almost as if it were natural continuity, as Mäkelä says that it occurs between the sixth and seventh symphonies of his countryman Sibelius. Then soon the Heroic Symphony and nothing will be as before.
In the first part of the program, the trumpeters Miguel Cerezo and Vicent Olmos, both Valencians, one from Llíria and the other from Paiporta, excelled in the Sonata for two violins and continuo, in B flat major Rv 76 by Vivaldi, in the adaptation for two trumpets signed by Olmos himself. Orchestra and teacher adjusted their sonorities to faithfully serve the baroque and unmistakable Vivaldian writing. Instrumental virtuosity and a sense of chamber music marked a lively applauded version, which continued outside the program with the unexpected but delicious encore by the famous Havanan from Don Gil of Alcala, by the also Valencian Manuel Penella. When the concert ended around 9:30 p.m., the afternoon was still inhabiting the unique and marine horizon of Santander. It was the icing on the cake of an evening in which the pleasure and illusion of music and its musicians reigned.
just rosemary
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