The Edward Elgar Mosaic
George Enescu Philharmonic, Bucharest: Beethoven Violin Concerto (Alena Baeva) and Elgar Enigma Variations
As never before, despite my tiredness, I sit down at my desk and start writing. Just like in the old days, when I would leave a performance and have the review fully written by the time I got home. It is the best sign that what I heard did not leave me indifferent; on the contrary, it touched me. But not in the way I was touched by Bach’s St Matthew Passion, with Gabriel Bebeșelea on the podium, or by Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, with the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko in a mental form his peers would find hard to match. Since I have been in Bucharest, I have not caught as good a season of the Philharmonic under Marin Cazacu, and I believe many think as I do. A series of concerts marked by eclecticism, with a program built around its guests – soloists and conductors – yet at the same time designed to show the orchestra at its best. Diversity was not necessarily the keyword of this season, but rather the intrinsic quality of the performances of everyone who took the stage week after week, with metronomic rigor, so that the relationship with music lovers and the faithful of the muse Terpsichore could be consolidated. It is increasingly difficult to cultivate and maintain such a relationship, in terms of quality and mutual respect, because we live in an age of compromise and commercial gain, which often pulls both us in the hall and those who take the stage to (en)chant us away from the realm of excellence. Now, at the end of the season, if I were to make rankings, they would remain subjective; I would not even allow myself to step outside this cone of aurea mediocritas (but take the expression in its original sense). Not at all by chance, the first three concerts that come to mind are the two mentioned above and this evening’s, with Courtney Lewis conducting. But, since with me there is almost always a but, this evening’s concert takes the podium because the Enigma Variations were the expression of a very rare combination of playfulness and expressiveness.
Imagine you have hundreds of pieces of glass that you must assemble into a large mosaic. You try to fit them together so that you obtain either a faithful copy of a particular image or a picture that satisfies you aesthetically. To reach the end, you rely on logic, experience, common sense, flexibility – and you even catch yourself acting like a child here and there. One way or another, you arrive at a final result, but the picture you obtain provokes either (self-)ironic smiles or bursts of laughter, and sometimes you notice that pieces are left over that did not find their place in the frame, even though they clearly belong there. This is also how the success of a concert can be explained: technically everything can be impeccable and yet nothing impresses you, or, conversely, you realize that here and there it was not quite right, and yet you absolutely love the end result. Imperfections have their role in music, because they belong to the human factor, that is, to emotion and a few other things: mental availability, the ability to work as a team, the flow of energy coming from the hall, and so on. If you also have phones ringing at random or audience members who want to comment at all costs, the zen of the evening is pretty much gone and, however well the instrumentalists play, you file the concert under failures. Even though for me Beethoven only came into its own in the last part of the concert – this is not to say that Alena Baeva was not as she should be, but simply that something was missing to make it memorable – Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations pulled me out of the comfort zone I had already settled into and tumbled me about (pardon the expression), so that at the end I left with the feeling that I could start a marathon without any trouble.
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Courtney Lewis is a conductor I want to see again, precisely because I cannot (yet) place him in any particular category. He has a distinctive way of leading the orchestra, surprisingly decisive, although his elegance and poise would make you believe something else entirely. The piping on his trousers and the unusually cut shirt make for a combination that verges on the eccentric, and yet nothing in what you hear leads your thoughts further in that direction. Meanwhile, you recall that he is British but has led an American orchestra for the past ten years (author’s note: while in theaters you can hardly find a program booklet anymore, at the George Enescu Philharmonic every concert has a booklet in which you learn all the details about the soloists, conductors and works performed); he has not ruled out collaborations with other orchestras, so he has traveled the world quite a bit – the condition of the contemporary artist also includes this readiness to travel a great deal.
Listening to the first variations, my thoughts ran to everything England received from its colonies, and the concert seemed to me the perfect expression of Elgar’s reverence for diversity. Let us not forget, the composer was born in one century and died in another – and what times he lived through! Lewis’s imperial bearing seems more than fitting in this musical context, and the delineation of the variations kept me circling around the word sketch. And yet nothing was sketchy; on the contrary, every musical sequence had an almost shocking depth. Elgar captured in notes like no one else the turmoil and profound transformations of global society at the beginning of the 20th century, when Romanticism was no more than the ghost of idyllic times and Europe was preparing for war, although no one imagined such a thing.
The percussion section treated us royally, while the woodwinds gave me the feeling that they were rejoicing in the triumph of the music; the double basses brought all their experience to bear, for in at least two sequences they were seriously put to work.
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I kept asking myself why Enigma and not another name; I did not find an answer that satisfied my ego, but I did realize that today Elgar would have made a living from film music. On another note, if for many the absence of unity – of a common thread binding all the sequences together – is shocking, for me this absence is nothing but the expression of a (perfect) logic of the lack of unity, that is, of what European society looked like at the beginning of the 20th century.
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Returning to the mosaic I mentioned at the beginning: this evening’s concert was of an unassailable imperfection. If there are paintings you must look at from a certain position (sometimes a downright unnatural one), well, I relate to the George Enescu Philharmonic concert with Courtney Lewis conducting as if I were contemplating the splendor of human nature. Nietzsche titled one of his books Ecce Homo; a contemporary of Elgar, he ended up with his popularity assured forever by the famous statement “God is dead!” The Enigma Variations, on the contrary, reminded me that God is in all things and that he works through people. Courtney Lewis is one of the chosen, and I hope to see him conduct again.
George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Courtney Lewis
Soloist: Alena Baeva
Program
Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61
Edward Elgar: Enigma Variations, Op. 36
Translated from the Romanian original.