It might be tempting to see something formulaic about the recently regular visits of Hungary’s Concerto Budapest under the baton of Andras Keller. Like previous visits, this one featured a top rank piano soloist – Paul Lewis this time – and mainstream repertoire, including a repeat chance to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of all familiar old friends.
The thing is, this is Keller and the orchestra he has re-shaped during the past two decades, and when they play Beethoven 5 they do it singularly well. This conductor understands the importance of the work’s opening motif but doesn’t hang about to worry over it. The bracing pace of his opening movement set up a gloriously spacious slow movement, still not exactly slow and with magnificent ensemble playing from the low strings that was a feature of the whole piece.
The string sound of this orchestra is singular and special, and as impressive at its quietest as it is when giving its mighty best. The pizzicato strings at the end of the scherzo third movement were as boldly pianissimo as Beethoven clearly instructs, but some interpretations are just too impatient to indulge.
All the other important ingredients of the work, from horns and brass to the crucial piccolo in the finale, sparkled, every player clear in the precise volume of their contribution at every moment, and the flow of ideas across the sections an integrated, collegiate effort.
That same approach was evident in the same composer’s Piano Concerto No 3 from four years earlier, also in C Minor and setting Beethoven on the path to the symphony. On this final date of their tour, Lewis and the orchestra were in perfect balance, the soloist always poised and relaxed, but assertive in his delayed opening statement in the first movement and its later cadenza, before edging towards languid in the beautiful song-like melody of the Largo.
The other elements of the programme were far from make-weight. Tchaikovsky’s Dante – and Wagner – influenced Francesca da Rimini had huge narrative drive as a concert-opener, with the horns and eight brass vying for attention over the powerful precision strings and the orchestra’s timpanist making the first of her many memorable contributions to the programme for the evening.
Wagner also looms large over Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes, his “Symphonic Poem No 3”, and pretty much the only one much played now. Opening the second half, it was also dramatic stuff and a great showcase for the Concerto Budapest strings from the start, big music from a relatively compact band.
It was also the only acknowledgement of the orchestra’s Hungarian origins until the encore, which demonstrated how best to play Bartok with folk-dance fervour.
Pianist Paul Lewis returns to Edinburgh this weekend. He tells KEN WALTON why ‘just being yourself’ is the key to honest fulfilment amid the noise of social media
Mention the name Paul Lewis, and the music that immediately springs to mind are the seminal piano canons of the great Viennese classicists: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. “It’s definitely the core of my repertoire,” confirms the 53-year-old Liverpool-born pianist, though pigeon-holing him in such a way is not altogether accurate.
“This year I’ve been playing a big new Piano Sonata by [Austrian pianist/composer] Thomas Larcher, and over the next few years I’ll be embarking on a series of recitals that cast Mozart in context with the likes of Poulenc, Debussy, Webern and Copland. ”I’m hoping the connections will be audible.” Knowing Lewis’ persuasive expressiveness and intellect, that’s a given.
That said, Lewis is in Edinburgh this weekend for an Usher Hall concert marking the only Scottish date in a five-city UK/Ireland tour with the idiosyncratic Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra, in which he turns his attention back to Beethoven. He’ll perform the Third Piano Concerto under the orchestra’s music director András Keller, who also conducts Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasy Francesca da Rimini, Liszt’s Les Preludes and Beethoven’s Symphony No 5.
Lewis dates his early fascination with Beethoven to frequenting the local Liverpool record library as an 8-year-old. “I guess the librarian there must have had a certain influence on the recordings it stocked. There was a lot of that central Germanic repertoire, coincidentally all of Alfred Brendel’s early Beethoven recordings for VOX/Turnabout in the 1960s.”
At the time, Lewis had not yet seriously engaged with the piano – progress as a budding cellist was proving more arduous than a natural calling – and it wasn’t until he headed to Manchester and the famous Chetham’s specialist music school, that his true metier at the keyboard blossomed. “Later in my teens I turned towards the Romantic piano virtuoso repertoire, but by the time I was a student in London I was focussing again on Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. I came back to that quite quickly.”
Then he met Alfred Brendel, and with that an opportunity to have lessons with the legend whose recordings had so influenced him as a youngster. “It was such an honour to have that access to him in the ‘90s. Every time I played to him it felt like a door opened musically speaking. He was such a powerful musical personality and had such strong convictions,” Lewis recalls.
“He was so persuasive in the way he communicated things, especially helping you think more creatively about the piano, how to treat it as anything but a piano, which was quite an eye-opener for me. It could be an orchestra, a chamber ensemble, a human voice or a single wind instrument. It was just so inspiring.”
The process was arduous but rewarding, Lewis recalls. “I found I’d play him something and it would take time for me to translate and successfully assimilate all the information. Yes, he was very prescriptive, very specific and exacting in lessons, but in the end he was really only interested in unleashing the personal conviction behind a performance, not in producing clones of himself. I soon realised the worst thing you could do is simply copy him, as all you’d end up with would be a bad version of Alfred Brendel. He wasn’t looking for that.”
Summing up the legacy of Brendel, who died earlier this year, Lewis turns again to shared enthusiasms. “He was the first person to record all of Beethoven’s piano music, and the first person to bring Schubert’s sonatas, previously neglected, into mainstream concert programmes. It’s strange to think he even introduced Liszt to Viennese audiences, a figure they traditionally turned their noses up at. Brendel persisted in what he believed was really worthwhile. Honesty and integrity were always at the centre of what he did.”
These qualities apply equally to Lewis, whose own critically-acclaimed recordings of Beethoven and Schubert, dating from over two decades ago, are already approaching the stuff of legend. What fascinates him most about these, especially the Beethoven, is how differently he views them today. “They would be very different if I recorded them now,” he confirms. “What changes over time is the balance you see between different elements of the music. Back then I get the impression I was looking more towards the lyrical quality of Beethoven, whereas these days I’d probably look towards the dramatic side. I guess you live your life and it feeds into what you do in ways you don’t necessarily understand.”
Paul Lewis and András Keller with Concerto Budapest
Lewis’ life has changed immeasurably in recent years, having shifted his family home to Norway (his wife, cellist Bjørg Lewis, is Norwegian), though maintaining a UK base in Buckinghamshire, where he and his wife jointly direct the annual chamber music festival Midsummer Music. He’s also begun to teach, having succeeded his friend, the late Lars Vogt, as a professor at the Hannover Hochschule für Musik.
“It’s the kind of thing I’ve wanted to get more involved with in recent recent years, with young pianists, and often wondered how to do it,” he says. “This seemed like a good opportunity and something I feel I need to do responsibly, so I’m gradually building up a class one student a year and trying to be there as much as I need to be.”
Is there any particular piece of advice he’d like to offload on young pianists today? “I’ve had the career that I wanted to have, focussing early on on certain composers for maybe a year or two, Beethoven and Schubert for instance. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back it kind of defines you as a certain type of musician and brings an identity along with it.
“These days, with the whole noise of social media, everyone’s out there sort of shouting, so it’s even more important to find a really distinctive identity, though how one does that is another question. My advice is to just be true to the musician you are, have very strong convictions about things. It’s the only way you’re going to convince anyone else. Don’t try to be anything you’re not because you think it will bring x, y or z results in career terms. Just try and stick to your honest musical path.”
Sound advice from a musician whose own journey has been fascinating; who has proved himself to be the genuine article.
Paul Lewis performs Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra at the Usher Hall on Sun 7 December. Full information at www.cultureedinburgh.com
Violinist-turned-conductor András Keller tells KEN WALTON about the Hungarian orchestra he has reshaped and renamed.
There’s a force of nature winding its way north this week and due to descend on Edinburgh at the weekend. It’s not a much-needed summer heatwave. Prepare instead for Concerto Budapest. According to at least one review of its first ever UK tour, this relatively unknown orchestra is hot stuff. “Virtuosity was turned to emotional ends,” wrote the Times critic of last Monday’s tour opener in London’s Cadogan Hall, which has subsequently progressed to Guildford, Basingstoke, Birmingham and Manchester.
It’s a solid, powerful and popular programme that conductor András Keller and his 80-strong band will repeat in their final concert at the Usher Hall this Sunday, amply framed by Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with Mozart’s evergreen Piano Concerto in A, K488, and soloist Angela Hewitt, in the middle. But the questions many may be asking are: who exactly are Concerto Budapest; and isn’t Keller that eponymous lead violinist of the Keller Quartet?
The answer to the latter question is yes. After a successful career as a concert violinist and founder of his own string quartet, Keller turned to conducting with the opportunity in 2007 to become artistic director and chief conductor of what was then the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra, now destined to become, under his leadership, Concerto Budapest.
Why the name change? It was, says Keller, an essential rebirth brought about by the need to resist artistically damaging commercial pressure. Two years after he joined the orchestra, its former sponsor, Hungarian Telekom, withdrew its support. “They changed their image and began supporting more popular musical styles than classical music,” he explains. “The ensemble was on the verge of collapse, followed by a long period of existential uncertainty – the musicians worked for ten months without pay. Both they and I made enormous sacrifices for our survival.”
Eventually the government stepped in and took over the funding and Keller set about rebuilding the orchestra. “The ensemble wasn’t in particularly good shape, going downhill. I simply started to relearn with them the entire repertoire: in the first two years, Haydn’s symphonies and Mozart’s piano concertos; then we moved on to Beethoven. I am convinced that all symphony orchestras must stand on the foundation of the Classical period. You can only build on that.”
And built on that it has. Well-respected for its refreshed vision of the classics, but armed also with equal recognition for its all-round mastery of the wider repertoire, not least its close championing of the music of Hungary’s foremost contemporary composer György Kurtág, Concerto Budapest is beginning to make waves around the world. The current UK tour follows previously successful visits to East Asia and France.
For Keller, his mission hasn’t just been about repertoire. During his 15 years with the orchestra his prime focus – as you’d expect from a player steeped in the rarefied intimacy of the string quartet world – has been on developing a distinctive sound. “One of my goals is that instrumental music should sound like a single human voice through the many hearts and one unified soul of our musicians. If an eighty-member orchestra can play with one heart and one soul, it will be an extraordinary ‘transfiguration’ of music.”
Transfiguration is a term readily applicable to the two big orchestral works in Sunday’s programme, even one so familiar as Beethoven’s Fifth. “The very fact that it’s maybe the best-known of all compositions ever written makes it an even greater challenge for each and every one of us. It gets at us. I sincerely hope that our performance will contribute something valuable to the piece’s history.”
As for the Bartók, who better than a spunky team of Hungarians to tell it as it is, to put this colossal 20th century figure in pertinent historical context. Every time we play Bartók’s Concerto it is undoubtedly a tremendous musical feast for me,” says Keller. “I regard Bartók as Beethoven’s successor, and the Concerto and its ideal are an equal to Beethoven’s Symphony No.9, as it articulates similar ideas regarding man and the world.
“Let me quote Bartók himself on this: ‘My main idea, which dominates me entirely, is the brotherhood of man over and above all conflicts… This is why I am open to influence by any fresh and healthy outside sources, be they Slovak, Romanian, Arabic or other’.”
Angela Hewitt performs Mozart with Concerto Budapest
To have had Angela Hewitt as soloist in the Mozart – Edinburgh audiences know her refined, articulate style well – has, for Keller, been a mutually creative experience. “I particularly enjoy working with soloists with whom I don’t need to have lengthy discussions on the essence of the piece, where we can organically tune into each other and enrich one another in the performance. Angela is one of these artists.”
As one who once exclusively inhabited the performance arena, what was it that drove Keller to pick up the baton instead of the bow? “Most probably, such thoughts had been ripening in me subconsciously for quite some time,” he recalls.
“As a musician, I felt that I wanted to experience a wider spectrum of music than string quartets, which are wonderful in themselves, but I had always been deeply interested in the symphonic repertoire too. Since I had acted as a soloist, a chamber musician and the concertmaster of various great symphony orchestras, this change had a well-grounded personal musical history.”
While he still performs with his Keller Quartet, conducting is now number one preference for the 61-year-old. “To be frank, or rather I feel that in a certain sense, it is easier to lead a symphony orchestra than a string quartet. One thing is for sure: my past in chamber music greatly influenced my notions of the performance style of a symphony orchestra.”
Scots, should they venture to the Usher Hall on Sunday, can test for themselves how well he has succeeded.
András Keller conducts Concerto Budapest as part of the Usher Hall’s Sunday Classics series on 12 June at 3pm. Details at www.usherhall.co.uk
