NCH, Dublin
Ives – The Unanswered Question.
Bartók – Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
Dvorak – New World Symphony.
Charles Ives’s
The Unanswered Question
is a work that never seems to pall. The experience of the piece is always a little bit like being dipped into a well of mystery.
Ives conjured that mystery by presenting the music in three independent layers – a perpetual string chorale that’s so calm it can seem almost motionless, seven spaced-out, utterances by a slow, angular, questioning trumpet, with responses from a woodwind quartet that’s provoked to ever higher states of agitation.
It’s astonishing that the piece was written in 1906, and even more astonishing that such an experimental undertaking should have weathered the passing of time so well.
Carlos Kalmar’s handling of the work with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra was impeccably judged, the strings imperturbable in the evenness of their serenity, the trumpet shaping its question marks with point, the woodwind conveying a sense of deepening dismay.
Kalmar’s approach was equally measured and pointed in Bartók’s
Music for strings, percussion and celesta,
another work which disperses unusual forces in a spatially unusual way on the platform.
I can’t recall another Dublin performance of this work which sounded quite so lucid in its pacing, so subtle in its mixing of sonorities, or so lithely sprung in its delivery of rhythmic energy.
Dvorak’s
New World
Symphony sounded equally fresh, full of sentiment but shorn of sentimentality. There were a few points at which Kalmar interrupted the flow with unwarranted tempo adjustments. But the general impression was of a familiar monument dusted off so that it glowed as new. The NSO provided playing that fully supported this view.
