THE
Camerata always sounds at its best in the intimate and lively acoustic of the
Royal Northern College of Music concert hall. This performance
had two considerable extra buzz factors: Giovanni Guzzo as
leader-director-soloist and Gabriela Montero as piano soloist and improviser
extraordinaire.
He brought
his own genius for style and intensity to the task. It’s what we remember from
his time as the orchestra’s regular leader, and even in such a subdued piece of
writing as Arvo Pärt’s Fratres (which to my mind is really rather longer than
it needs to be) he galvanized the sound as it reached the top of its emotional
arch.
Piazzolla’s
The Four Season Of Buenos Aires was probably far more on his wavelength,
brimming with South American rhythmic life, and with his solos much enhanced by
Hannah Robert’s own on the cello. The weather sequence in Buenos Aires
The finale
of the concert was Britten’s Variations On A Theme By Frank Bridge. Guzzo had
his musicians really enjoying their virtuoso ensemble playing here, with richly
burnished violin tone in the Romance, an Aria Italiana which sounded like a
very convivial night out in a trattoria, big bravura in the Wiener Walzer, and
the quizzical endings of the Funeral March and Fugue And Finale subtly done.
But that
was not all this programme had to offer. Gabriela Montero is a phenomenon in
her own right. She was the highly accomplished soloist in Mozart’s piano
concerto no. 14 in E flat K449, her approach gelling with fellow-Venezuelan
Guzzi’s in the bouncy final movement, and a real sense of dialogue with the
orchestra strings emerging in the slow movement.
For the
first movement cadenza she rattled off a very stylish sequence in free fantasia
style, but that was just a foretaste of what came after the concerto. Her
trademark spot of asking the audience to suggest tunes from which she can
improvise resulted in two instant creations: the first a rhapsodic expansion of
the first phrases of McCartney’s Yesterday which began somewhere between Chopin
and Rachmaninov with, finally, a touch of Gershwin – still twice as good as
some of the stuff peddled by populist Italian pianists which they conceive to
be original compositions.
The second
was on the Marseillaise. I was afraid someone would suggest that, because it
could have brought out mawkishness and shallow emotion, but she began in severely
contrapuntal style, worked her way from Mozart to Beethoven and finally, in a
thunder of double octaves, gave it an exposition Liszt would have been proud
of.
****
Robert
Beale
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