Such an ovation has never been experienced in Ventspils. That’s what an unknown lady tells me, whose seat in the concert hall is right next to Latvia. The standing ovation is passionate, long and deserved, because the performance and self-sacrifice of the musicians of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra (LNSO) and the collective’s artistic director, conductor Tarmo Peltokoski, in the program of Richard Strauss and Alfred Šnitke was truly stunning. It was not only admirable, but most importantly, magnetically attractive. Immersive in the world of musical images, ideas and sound, and also with the very first moments of the symphonic poem Don Juan, which Tarmo Peltokoski and the orchestra filled with amazing energy and passion. An excellent ally for musicians was the Ventspils concert hall, which was built specifically for acoustic music. The listeners witnessed how the sound of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra flourishes and breathes.
Tenderness and sublimity
This was Tarmo Peltokoski’s third program with the LNSO, which he conducted as artistic director of our orchestra. They gave the first two concerts of this season together in Cēsis and Riga Cathedral. Well, the time had come to play music in the home of the orchestra in the Great Guild, where Tarmo Peltokoski’s first meeting with the LNSO took place last January, and in Ventspils, where the young Finnish artist visited for the first time. I took the opportunity to compare the sound of the same program in both concert halls (March 31 in Riga, April 1 in Ventspils). The comparison confirmed the finding that the acoustic concert hall is the third important player in the interpretation of the compositions. Here, the sound has a place to expand and live in the room. The sound acquires depth, roundness and flattery, it becomes almost erotically captivating, as it acquires the dimension and irresistible appeal that the Grand Guild would lack.
This is especially important for the orchestral splendor of Richard Strauss’s scores, which were fully revealed in an acoustically favorable environment. Conducting the performance with extraordinary temperament, highlighting contrasts, savoring the finer nuances and inspiring the orchestra, Tarmo Peltokoski fills the musical message with a generous color palette of moods, emotions and characters. It is evident that he has complete trust in the orchestra and the orchestra trusts its conductor. Together, they reveal the message of the music with an obvious collective delight, starting with energetic bravura and unbridled passion, which in one story portrays its hero – an adventurer, and in another – allows you to almost look into the bedroom of passionate lovers, and ends with sophistication, tenderness and sublimity. Both in the full and powerful force of the tutti, and in the many solo episodes of the orchestral instruments, especially the oboe. All three works of Richard Strauss included in the program – Don Juan, symphonic fantasy from the opera A woman without a shadow and entourage Knight of Roses – not only conjured up the images, situations, emotionality and environment of the characters of these works in a cinematic expression (through a lush, elegant Viennese waltz, the shiny silver rose reflections in the high sounds of the flutes, etc.) – the performance of these pieces also clearly showed why we are called concertmasters of orchestral instrument groups also for solo oboe, solo clarinet, solo horn, solo flute, solo bassoon, etc. Solo wind instruments have room to expand here, although, of course, the felt solo of the first violin also stands out.
The first violin is a separate story this time, as Georg Sarkisyan took on a double burden in this program, playing both at the LNSO concertmaster’s desk and also as a soloist, playing Alfred Schnitke’s together with Daria Smirnova and the orchestra’s string group. Concerto grosso No. 3 for two violins, harpsichord, piano and cello.
A message for the ages
My six Big concert Alfred Schnittke, a German-Jewish composer still living in the USSR at the time, started the cycle at the request of violinists Gidon Krämer and Tatjana Grindenko, filling the popular baroque genre with a distinctly contemporary, polystylistic musical language. It also sharply and unequivocally revealed the dissonance of the creative spirit with the Soviet power. At that time, the composer was not allowed to go outside the countries of the socialist bloc, and in this context, the story of how he still got to the West is famous, because after Big concert for performances in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Moscow, Riga, Tallinn and Budapest, Gidon Kremer managed to request the composer as a harpsichordist for the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra’s tour to Germany and Austria, where he also experienced the historic Big concert premiered at the Salzburg Festival.
Third Big concert (1985) was commissioned by GDR Radio as a tribute to the anniversaries of five prominent composers. These are composers from different eras whose year of birth ends with the number “85”: Heinrich Schitz (1585), Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedrich Handel and Domenico Scarlatti (all born in 1685) and Albans Berg (1885), a representative of the New Vienna School. By incorporating quotations and allusions related to the jubilee heritage into the conceptual, rationally constructed five-part composition, Schnittke has at the same time emotionally exposed the existential reality of his own life – how he feels, living in the nightmarish Soviet regime, in fact a dead end. At that time, the composer was already forbidden to leave the USSR, and the year 1985 in his biography is also associated with the first stroke he suffered and miraculous recovery from clinical death. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1990.
This is not LNSO violinist Darja Smirnova’s first encounter with the music of Alfred Šnitke. The deep, expressive Šnitkes remains vividly remembered First Concerto grosso a duet reading with Sandi Steinberg in the spring of 2019 together with the LNSO, at which the great conductor Vladimirs Fedosoev took the conductor’s desk. Now playing under Tarmo Peltokoski Third Concerto grosso together with Georg Sarkissian, pianist Martyn Zilbert (on piano, harpsichord and celesti) and the LNSO string group, the message inevitably revealed the traumatic collision of the ideal and the real world: from the initially harmonious baroque passages to the moment when both the soloists and the orchestra become voiceless. Symbolically.
It is an irony of fate that on that very night, while the first concert of this LNSO program was held in Riga, LTV Kultūršoks reported on the chamber orchestra’s Sinfonietta Riga concertmaster Marta Spārniņa’s resignation, thus protesting against the fact that the orchestra has not excluded the music of Russian composers from its repertoire.
The current big question is: is it permissible to continue playing Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich during the war? Do we categorically exclude everyone from circulation or do we still value each specific personality, its life and contribution? Instead of a discussion, I will remind you here Day written by musicologist Ingrīdas Zemzare during peacetime, after two evenings in the fall of 2004 at the LNSO and Kremerata Baltica performed all six Schnitkes under the leadership of conductor Andras Nelsons Big concert: “Apparently, culture feels the need to come to terms with the past but not past century – what does the almost forgotten long life mean to us in the conditions of a totalitarian society, which in art used to heat up the underground tension to a white glow. (..) There were many young people in the hall, and they said that they liked . That they understand. This means that the value of the art itself is greater than the programmed knowledge of the era.”
