Monday, March 29, 2021

"Reflection" - the Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra welcomes its audience back to the concert hall at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Maestro Doron Salomon, Hagai Shaham (Y. Hirata)


 

The Israel Netanya Kibbutz Orchestra and its audience had every reason to celebrate the event in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Recanati Auditorium on March 25th 2021. “Reflection” was the first live concert event to take place in over a year, after public venues had been        closed down due to Israeli Covid-19 restrictions. Established in 1970, the NKO was performing the concert in honour of 50 years of its existence. Today, the orchestra functions under two conductors - resident artistic director Shmuel Elbaz and Christian Lindberg (Sweden), the orchestra’s musical director. Conducting this concert, however, was former NKO musical director Doron Salomon. In his words of welcome, Salomon spoke of the orchestra's warmth and energy. Violinist Hagai Shaham was the evening’s soloist.

 

The event opened with Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No.49 in F minor “La Passione” (not Haydn’s title).  Dating from 1768, its minor mode (pervading all movements!) stems from Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period, the trend influencing music, literature, painting and theatre, in which artists were exploring emotional extremes and distress. Setting the scene, the Adagio movement, cantabile and thought-provoking, gave way to the sudden dynamic contrasts, nervous syncopations and wild leaps of the Allegro di molto movement, wrought in contrasting colours and textures, offering hearty tutti as against delicate, pared-down utterances. Following the Minuet, with its charming small comments and transitions (the Trio providing temporary major tonality respite from the key of F minor) the Presto burst forth with exhilarating freshness and featuring some fine wind playing. For Haydn who, at this time, was expected to perform his works solely to the Prince and a limited audience at the Esterháza residence, Eisenstadt Castle, there would normally be 12 to 16 players available for any one performance. The NKO set-up suited this concept splendidly, the instrumentalists addressing the fine details of Haydn’s Classical layering with articulacy. 

 

Extra players joined those already on stage for the performance of Max Bruch’s Concerto No.1 in G minor for violin and orchestra, Op.26. Unfortunately, this work has suffered much at the hands of musicians “playing in a way that sounds cheap or schmaltzy” in the words of American violinist Joshua Bell. However, the NKO’s inspired rendition of it, consolidated by much eye contact between soloist Hagai Shaham and Maestro Salomon, emerged as a rewarding and exciting listening experience. Salomon gave expression to the work’s lush, passionate orchestral writing as Shaham played the solo role splendidly, handling its gamut of violin techniques and devilishly difficult passages with authority and profound feeling. He and Salomon took the listener through the work’s roller-coaster ride of mood changes, the soaring, lyrical beauty of soulful melodies and its uncompromising emotional outbursts, wrapping up with the rousing energy and drama of the gypsy-driven Finale. For his encore, Shaham gave a reflective reading of the Andante from J.S.Bach’s Sonata No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003. 

 

The program concluded with Zoltán Kodály’s “Dances of Galánta”. Kodály composed the work in 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. Galánta is a small, Hungarian market town between Vienna and Budapest, where the composer spent seven years of his childhood. It was there that a famous gypsy band gave the young Kodály his first taste of  “orchestral” sounds. Kodály’s work takes folk material from a collection of Hungarian dances published in Vienna a century earlier, these dances actually including one by gypsies from Galánta. The work is an expanded “verbunkos”, (an 18th-19th century Hungary dance show performed by a recruiting sergeant and his hussars for potential army enlistees.) Salomon and the players presented the audience with Kodály’s colourful flow of dances - some rousing, some feisty, some earthy, others lilting, whimsical, even reticent or plangent - a head-spinning succession of small, vibrant scenes. Fine, soul-stirring orchestral fare, the many pleasing solos and small group ensembles displayed the high quality of individual- and orchestral playing constantly upheld by this orchestra.

Hagai Shaham (Miri Shamir)
 Doron Salomon (Miri Shamir)




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