Tag Archives: Teresa Riveiro Böhm

NYOS / Amatis Trio / Böhm

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City Halls, Glasgow

Attendees at the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s Summer Concert must have wondered what on earth was going on. No sooner had the orchestra’s young musicians taken the stage and duly tuned than they were up and off again, filing into the wings. Was this a latter day Hoffnung concert? What was the joke? A ripple of quiet bemusement swept around the audience.

Then a lone cellist positioned himself centre stage, the wind and brass reappeared en masse in the choir gallery, the former struck up a winsome melody while a distant ambulant solo violin added its conversational response. Bit by bit the strings returned to the stage, striking up incrementally as if Haydn’s Farewell Symphony had shifted into reverse. 

What we were experiencing was Andrea Tarrodi’s imaginative new concerto for piano trio and orchestra, Moorlands and beyond…, commissioned jointly by the Amatis Trio and NYOS, and premiered in the weekend’s concerts in Edinburgh (Friday) and Glasgow. For an organisation that has undergone something of a restructuring and repositioning in recent years, this was as firm a statement of self-belief and purpose as you’d hope to witness.

It wasn’t just the daringness of the project that struck such a positive chord, as the persuasive attitude and virile sound emanating from this orchestra. Under conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm (an erstwhile Leverhulme Conducting Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Saturday’s performances – there was also music by Grieg and Stravinsky – were remarkable for their arresting spirit and glowing confidence.   

Tarrodi’s haunting score asks for nothing less. As a luscious soundscape expanded from an earlier piece, Moorlands for piano trio, and inspired by the bleak Highlands landscape the Swedish composer encountered during a Scottish road trip, it is deceptively challenging. While its motivic material may be essentially simple, the textures are picturesque, idyllic and at times mystical, a complexity of impressionist brushstrokes richly captured and, in this instance, enchantingly portrayed.

The Amatis Trio played a more integrated than prominent role, a deliberate ploy on Tarrodi’s part, yet there were star-studded moments where their cool virtuosity offered opportunity for them to emerge out of the melting pot. All in all, though, this was an impressive team effort.

Grieg’s Norwegian Dances – originally written as piano duets – offered an immediate upswing in Scandinavian tempo, grasped enthusiastically by the a rustically-charged NYOS. It wasn’t just their fiery energy that dazzled, but the supple, sometimes mischievous nuances and exquisite solo contributions encouraged by Böhm’s demonstrative lead. 

The most impressive achievement came in the second half with Stravinsky’s 1947 version of Petrushka, a performance resplendent in musical characterisation, intoxicating rhythmic precision and pyrotechnic virtuosity. Even if the balance at times seemed miscalculated, there was always a palpable sense of conviction and joy to ensure this performance maintained its compulsive charm and effusive elan. 

Ken Walton 

(Photo: Alison Laredo)

BBC SSO / Böhm

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Ayr Town Hall

So many times in the past, a programme by the BBC SSO geared primarily for its Glasgow City Halls’ home has either proved unsuitable for its repeat in Ayr, or is downscaled to suit the acoustical constraints of the smaller venue. This programme, however, was already of perfect dimensions and may even have benefitted more from the intimate warmth this bijou municipal venue favours. 

The larger-scored of the works – Prokofiev’s feverishly sweet Violin Concerto No 2 and Schubert’s crystalline Fifth Symphony – are hardly symbols of orchestral brute force. Instead, Prokofiev’s concerto, played here by the characterful Dutch-born violinist Rosanne Philippens, pits a zestful protagonist against a mutable kaleidoscopic spray of orchestral colour, its spiced delicacies only marginally threatened by the irksome persistence of the bass drum. Schubert’s Fifth looks back to Beethoven and Mozart, lithe and cheery, softened by the composer’s instinctive lyrical genius.

The young Austro-Spanish conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm was in many ways a refreshing presence on the rostrum. A few years ago she spent time at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland  on a Leverhulme Conducting Fellowship that included mentorship via the BBC SSO, and has recently been appointed associate conductor at Welsh National Opera. On this latest evidence she was a visibly safe pair of hands, clear and precise with a decisive spring in her step. 

That certainly helped energise the Prokofiev, which was rhythmically catching and where conductor and soloist shared a mutual spark. Philippens was the prominent driving force, her fiery outer movements dancing to the music’s sardonic pleasures, contrasted in turn by the bittersweet tensions of the central Andante. Böhm’s handling of the orchestral balance wasn’t always as acute as it could have been, some of the most sensitive delights lost to what seemed a textural free-for-all. Philippens endorsed her dazzling persona with a Romanian folk-inspired encore by Enescu. 

Böhm’s Schubert did her far greater justice. Elegance and crispness underpinned her vision, as well as a far greater control of motivic interaction as the directional force. The slow movement may have underplayed Schubert’s prescribed “con moto”, but there was ample poetic soul in the lingering, lyrical lines to give it meaning and bearing. It was the expressive heart of a performance whose opening and closing Allegros harnessed natural, life-giving energy, and whose Menuetto was as naturally breezy as it was tightly disciplined.

Both works alternated with refreshing curiosities by female composers. The opener was by Bacewicz, her Divertimento for string orchestra, written four years before her death in 1965. Its combination of beguiling modernism, as influenced by fellow Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, with the pragmatic austerity of, say, Bartok or Hindemith, had clearly reached a point of magical synthesis by this stage in her life. The SSO strings captured that well in an incisive performance, clinically assertive in the outer movements, conjuring up an air of unworldly suspension in the central Adagio.

The Schubert was prefaced by the UK premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Eterniday (a linguistic elision of “eternity” and day”), which the American composer wrote in 2010 in response to the loss of her sketches the previous year in a fire at her New York studio. Formatted like a Baroque concert grosso, the central solo quintet vying with the larger surrounding ripieno, it represents, according to the composer, “something everlasting and fragile, yet blended together into one”.

Sure enough, the sound world is outwardly translucent with a heated density countering its natural inclination to float away into the ether. There’s drama in the series of fearsome, coruscating crescendos, abruptly shut off as they reach deafening point to reveal awesome punctuating silences. The impact of a glistening celeste diametrically opposed to the menacing cipher of the bass drum adds a signature surprise. 

Like everything else on Friday, it was of a scale that blossomed in this compact venue. 

Ken Walton