Tag Archives: Patrick Hahn

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Although it was not excessively long, there was a lot – perhaps a little too much – in Saturday’s penultimate RSNO season concert. On the podium was Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn, appointed to the orchestra two years ago, whose programmes are always characterful.

This one began with most of the stage in darkness for a movement entitled God-Music from George Crumb’s Black Angels, his anti-Vietnam War composition best known in the recording by the Kronos Quartet. With the orchestra’s percussion section in a pool of light, the evening’s soloist, cellist Kian Soltani was spotlit above them in the choir stalls for the three minutes of his aria accompagnata.

It led directly into the big opening chord of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, a statement of opposition to the Second World War which failed to please its commissioners but has become a concert hall favourite as the first of the composer’s few orchestral works without a soloist.

That matching of two complementary works was repeated after the interval by Hahn with Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde preceding Alexander Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, the composer’s slightly unhinged expression of extra-marital lust.

Immediately before the interval sat the work on the ticket, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, for which Soltani had been booked to make his RSNO debut. The first cello in Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra a decade ago, Soltani now has a global career as an orchestral soloist and chamber musician and his powerful yet precise performance of this most familiar of works made some passages leap into focus with startling clarity, although there may have been listeners looking for more obvious emotion in his playing.

The Adagio third movement was fulsome, and the cellist’s capacity for delicacy was nowhere clearer than in his encore of Reza Vali’s The Girl from Shiraz.

Hahn’s programming decisions around the work, while fascinating, did raise some questions about the way the music was used. If it is hard to say whether Crumb would have approved of the repurposing of his colourful way with wine glasses as a precursor to the Britten, but it seems likely that Wagner would have been less than pleased to be the hors d’oeuvre to the excesses of Scriabin.

It certainly seemed that the full passion of the RSNO strings was reserved for the closing piece, with all its echoes of Wagner and Strauss and leader Maya Iwabuchi adding perfectly measured soloing. In the Prelude to Tristan, on the other hand, the section leaders often seemed to be working hard to encourage their players to up their game. Perhaps there was an element of post-tour fatigue, given that the orchestra is newly returned from dates in China.

That said, the climaxes of the Poem of Ecstasy were epic and joyous, and Hahn paced his idiosyncratic evening with great skill, never over-directing his musicians but across all the details and urging them to full expression when it really mattered.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Kian Soltani in rehearsal by Clara Cowen/RSNO

RSNO / Hahn / Dupree

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Most listeners have no problem liking George Gershwin and Sergei Rachmaninov – the headline composers here – but self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music” George Antheil still has the ability to divide opinion a century after the deliberate provocation of his Ballet Mecanique.

The judgement of history on his “Glandbook for a Questing Male” article for Esquire magazine is likely to be harsh, but his music, for all its cut-and-paste chaos, remains diverting and fun. In this hugely entertaining RSNO concert it also set the tone for the first half at least.

The orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn was the piano soloist for Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, composed in 1925, partly as a response to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and played here in the revised, rather more concise but  equally mis-named, 1955 revision.

It was great to hear Hahn displaying his pianistic chops on the challenging score, and the RSNO matched him – doubtless counting like mad – as the score sampled everything from Dixieland to big band to cabaret versions of the jazz idiom, careering wildly across them all at break-neck speed with many abrupt switches of pace and tempo.

On  the podium, and keeping the crazy vehicle on track, was German musician Frank Dupree who then – amidst much appropriate pantomime – became the piano soloist for his own arrangement of Gershwin’s own response to Rhapsody in Blue, his Piano Concerto in F, which premiered in New York in 1925.

Dupree’s “jazz trio” version is perhaps contradictory to the original’s symphonic ambitions, but works extraordinarily well on its own terms. Dupree was rarely heard on his own, with most of the solo piano part accompanied by the double bass of Jakob Krupp and the drums and cymbals of Obi Jenne, culminating in an extended last movement cadenza that incorporated a nod to Rhapsody in Blue itself.

In this orchestral democracy there was great support from the RSNO players too, with muted horn, three clarinets and especially first trumpet Chris Hart all on fine jazzy form. The encore – which we would surely have heard even if the audience reception had been more muted – was a rollicking take on Duke Ellington’s Caravan with Hahn, Dupree and his rhythm section joined by the entire percussion section, displaying amusingly diverse degrees of enthusiasm.

After the interval Hahn returned to the podium to direct an interpretation of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 3, from 1935/6, that was significantly less a throwback to Romanticism than might have been anticipated. Its three movements each contain a reference to the piano-featuring Rhapsody that preceded it (the one on a Theme of Paganini) as if it too was making a more serious statement after the flash of its predecessor.

Those rhythmic signatures were especially clear in Hahn’s reading, as were the orchestration debts that the score owes to earlier 20th century music, especially Debussy. The RSNO strings, under leader Igor Yuzefovich, delivered top-drawer playing, and the work emerged as every bit the equal of the much more frequently played Second Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Recorded by BBC Radio 3 for broadcast and available  for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.

RSNO/Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

With the addition of four minutes of music at its start, RSNO Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn made a concert of the apparently tricky task of combining the RSNO Chorus’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem with the Berg Violin Concerto the orchestra had been recording with soloist Carolin Widmann during the week.

Widmann’s Berg will appear with the Britten Violin Concerto it undoubtedly influenced, and if her performance of it on Saturday is a guide, that will be a disc worth looking out for. In the second of its two movements her technical virtuosity shone, while the first established as fine a demonstration of partnership with a conductor and orchestra as you might hope to hear. The composer’s adaptation of the structures of serialism to his own purpose are part of what distinguishes the 1936 work, but it was the meticulous attention to the work’s own structure that really impressed here.

It was composed as a memorial to the 18-year-old daughter of Walter Gropius, Manon, and the other works in the programme also remembered women who died very young, the Mozart Requiem commissioned by Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach as a memorial for his wife, who died on Valentine’s Day, 1791, aged just 20.

Mozart’s progress on the commission was interrupted by the first performances of his penultimate opera, La clemenza di Tito, and work on The Magic Flute, and the operatic flavour of the Requiem was given its best expression in the ensemble work of the soloists – soprano Mhairi Lawson, mezzo Hanna Hipp, tenor Jamie MacDougall and baritone Laurent Naouri (replacing the advertised Daniel Okulitch).

In parallel, the full might of the RSNO Chorus was given full attention by Hahn, and there was occasionally a suspicion that his tempi were a shade faster than they might have liked. This was a brisk Requiem, and not an especially affecting one, but it was full of colour, particularly from the orchestra, with a pair of basset horns present as scored, and the trombone section on top form.

Those four minutes of music that knitted the two masterworks together came right at the beginning of the programme. Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang was written in memory of the wife of the composer’s friend and supporter Baron Johann Baptiste Pasqualati, who died in childbirth at 24. The choral miniature is a late rarity in the composer’s catalogue and Hahn used it to preface the Berg, into which it segued without a pause.

Even if the the men of the RSNO Chorus were less assured in its opening bars than they would be later for the Mozart, it was a highly effective idea. The dynamic ideas Beethoven rehearses in this compact gem clearly found fuller expression in the finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Keith Bruce

Picture from Katie Kean/RSNO

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The young team were in charge at Scotland’s national orchestra, and it was an excellent advert for the RSNO’s recruitment policy. Both still in their late 20s, soloist Randall Goosby and Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Hahn made a fine partnership, and their programme, sourced from the other side of the Atlantic, made superb narrative sense. If the pair had any advice for the audience, it was: “Of course you know these tunes, but listen to the music.”

The evening culminated in Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony and as fresh a take on that old war horse as you might hope to hear, a long way from cobbled streets and Hovis bread. That second movement cor anglais melody was performed with a crisper rhythm, taken up by the front desk strings when they are passed the tune, and that brisk approach ran through the entire performance, from the very carefully-measured dynamics of the opening bars to the switching of focus between the different sections of the orchestra 40 minutes later.

It is perhaps debatable whether the young Austrian has yet imposed his personality on the RSNO, but his relaxed approach to the direction of the concert’s opening work suggests he already knows when that is unnecessary. With a jazz piano side to his own musical make-up, the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s singular take on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music suited what we know of Hahn. This was a recent orchestration of Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of 65 years ago, by Jeff Tyzik, who made his European conducting debut with the RSNO back in 2010.

Tyzik’s arrangement is for concert orchestra, the strings giving the suite a symphonic character, requiring fewer jazz soloists. These were past and present stalwarts of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: drummer Alyn Cosker and bassist Calum Gourlay as the rhythm section and soloists Ryan Quigley, on trumpet, and Martin Kershaw, doubling alto and tenor saxophones.

Kershaw shone especially brightly, but the orchestra’s own winds and brass were also on swinging form. What might have been an odd hybrid was a resounding success on its own terms.

Violinist Randall Goosby is the RSNO’s Artist in Residence this season and his approach to the Barber Violin Concerto chimed perfectly with the conductor’s to the entire concert, leaving no room for the sort of sentimentality the material can sometimes encourage.

Goosby was in his element in the more challenging sections of the outer movements, and his interpretation gave the piece animated propulsion towards the virtuosic finale.

He followed it with an encore that was equally taxing. Its composer, Coleridge Perkinson, is every bit as fascinating as his young advocate suggested, and he also ignored musical boundaries in a fashion very similar to this programme.

Keith Bruce

RSNO / Hahn

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It was one of these nights when all the stars aligned. The RSNO’s new principal guest conductor Patrick Hahn proved why this orchestra was so keen to sign him up after an unplanned debut as an eleventh hour substitution last year. With him on Saturday was Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko, a Russian-trained tour de force, whose pulverising charisma set Liszt’s First Piano Concerto on fire. Then there was the RSNO itself, inspired from the outset, playing its heart out in Rachmaninov, resplendent in a programme designed to intoxicate and impress.

It opened with something of a novelty, the crisp and tantalising ambiguities of Gottfried von Einem’s Capriccio. Einem, born into a high-ranking Austrian family, moved to Berlin in the late 1930s to study with Paul Hindemith. In Capriccio, premiered in the war-stricken German capital in 1943, his mentor’s influence is palpable, as are the traits associated with sassy inter-war Berlin, hints of Brechtian cabaret spirit mixed with rollicking jazz-like tropes. Hahn elicited just enough edginess, a kind of clipped decadence, to counter the ghost of Wagner ever-lurking behind the frenzy of Einem’s austere modernism.

That, in itself, pointed the way to Kholodenko’s attention-grabbing Liszt. It was all of one mind – Hahn’s and the orchestra’s explosive opening met with the pounding venom of the pianist’s opening response, Kholodenko combining virile rhetoric and fortitude with moments of sheer eloquence and expressive fluidity. His one-to-one dialogues with members of the orchestra were like theatrical cameos, insinuating and charismatic; his encounters with the full ensemble an equal and bracing match. 

In all of this, Hahn showed himself to be both at ease and in complete control, ultimate proof of that coming in Rachmaninov’s epic Second Symphony. The massive opening Largo was anything but monolithic, equal attention paid to its seismic detail as to the unifying power of its outer shell. Where the scurrying second movement Allegro Molto acted like a purifying breeze, the Largo, set in motion by sweet-scented strings and that melting clarinet solo, instilled a passion and composure creditable only to the pen of Rachmaninov. Hahn gave the Finale ample space to breath without losing the unstoppable affirmation it naturally calls for. The instantly cheering audience knew it had witnessed something special.

Ken Walton

RSNO / Hahn 

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall 

The day after a scratch orchestra had played film music to a reportedly packed house in a concert organised by a commercial promoter, it was disappointing that the RSNO was greeted by a half-filled hall for a programme of equally attractive concert music with the bonus of a Scottish premiere from the country’s best-known living composer performed by an international star. 

That soloist was mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill and the Three Scottish Songs were new orchestrations by Sir James MacMillan only previously heard in March this year, when the singer was Ian Bostridge and the orchestra the Britten Sinfonia. 

Superficially, they make an odd trio, the first two in Scots and intimate words of love and loss composed by MacMillan to sound akin to folk songs of an earlier era. The third, The Children, also sets words by William Soutar, but written in English and a harrowing evocation of the war-time loss of innocent lives, written during the Spanish Civil War. Its sound-world is entirely different, distinctly in the composer’s style, and as explicit as the text. 

There is, however, a consistently spare style to all three, Cargill beginning the first two unaccompanied and singing solo for most of the first stanza of The Children after an initial chord. The composer uses only strings and percussion, and the instrumental silences are often as eloquent as the music in his arrangements, with the focus always on the singer, at least until the cataclysmic percussive conclusion. 

Who knows how Bostridge, whose Englishness makes him a great interpreter of Noel Coward’s songs, coped with the linguistic transition inherent in the set, but it presented no difficulty to Cargill and there was in her interpretation a clear line from the personal to the universal. What links all three of William Soutar’s poems is the veracity of their emotional truth and MacMillan and the mezzo masterfully communicated that. 

The concert was to have been conducted by Maestro “Sasha” Lazarev, the orchestra’s Russian Conductor Emeritus, whose presence was impossible because of the global situation. Perhaps his absence was linked to the number of empty seats, but if so, those who stayed away missed a debut on the podium that was worth witnessing. 

Austrian conductor Patrick Hahn is still in his 20s, and already has a list of senior posts in Germany on his CV, and apparently sings cabaret songs and plays a mean jazz piano as well. Taking over the existing RSNO programme this week, the spare essence of the MacMillan was bracketed by huge orchestral stuff – three movements from Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. 

A diminishing number of folk must now hear the former and see a tall ship in full sail battling the waves, thanks to its use in the BBC TV drama The Onedin Line, and that will certainly not be the case for the young conductor. That theme was presented here at the centre of a suite that started quietly but swiftly unleashed the full power of the symphony orchestra and concluded with a triple-time section to rival the Armenian composer’s other great waltz, which the touring RSNO played as an encore under conductor Peter Oundjian, and a great brass climax. 

Tchaikovsky 4 also featured in an Oundjian touring programme. Hahn took the work at his own very measured pace, a quietly deliberate way with the dramatic opening that paid dividends later. I don’t think I have heard the orchestra play quite so quietly before the first clarinet’s entry. There was a very precise ebb and flow in the pizzicato Scherzo too, and a full range of contrasts and dynamics in the Finale – and another huge finish. I’d wager that the whizz-kid from Ganz will be back. 

Keith Bruce