Violin Concerto in E - Bach
Violin Concerto in D minor - Mendelssohn
Death and the Maiden Quartet - Schubert/Mahler
The New European Strings Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1990 by the Russian violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky, a man best known in Ireland as the principal conductor and artistic adviser of the Ulster Orchestra. His "other" orchestra, on the evidence of its Irish debut at the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Wednesday (in St Canice's Cathedral) is no mean band in terms of polish and precision.
Polish and precision, of course, only take one so far in the music of Bach. And Wednesday's offering of the E major Violin Concerto, which was on the chilly side of clinical, brought to mind those performances of the 1960s where perfection of mechanism was allowed to exclude an essential animation of spirit.
The D minor Violin Concerto of Mendelssohn's early teenage years is in many ways a matter of wonder. But the 13-year-old's accomplishments didn't save him from a degree of redundant elaboration which rules out any effective tightness of structure. The piece's attraction today is that it fills a hole in the repertoire (where are all the other 19th-century concertos with string accompaniment?), and does it with the benefit of a famous name.
To provide a really satisfying concert experience, this concerto requires a very special kind of advocate, which Sitkovetsky (whose solo playing was not as consistently sweet in intonation as might be expected from a player of his reputation) did not turn out to be.
Mahler's string-orchestra version of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet is another problematic work. In its enlarged guise, Schubert's music not only loses its intimacy but becomes irritatingly strait-laced, rather as if the mass-movement patterns of Riverdance were to be applied to solos from classical ballet. The essential individual freedom of expression is simply suffocated.
The disagreement over first violin details in an otherwise technically impressive performance was actually probably a positive sign. It sounded as if the musicians knew the work well enough from playing it as a string quartet to experience moments when they couldn't suppress their innate responses to the flexibility the music really needs. Maybe this is something Mahler as a conductor was able to draw on and focus in an organic way with a large number of players.
The edgy, short Scherzo by Shostakovich offered as an encore was the most enjoyable item of the evening, showing what a different concert it could have been, had the repertoire been more aptly chosen.
