VIOLINIST HENNING KRAGGERUD DELIGHTS WITH A GRIEG ARRANGEMENT AND MOZART
Henning Kraggerud (violin/director), Vancouver Symphony Orchestra: Music of Grieg, Beach and Mozart, Chan Centre, January 8, 2023.
In recent years, Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud has shown a great fondness for play/direct concerts that feature string orchestra arrangements of well-known violin and chamber pieces. Doubtlessly, this gives any orchestra he encounters a sense of challenge: not only does the ensemble have to accommodate the format but they have to gain familiarity with orchestral transcriptions not previously seen. Yet Kraggerud always seems to elicit inspired results from an orchestra, quite consistent with the effervescence and magic in his own playing. On his last visit to Vancouver, we were offered Bernt Simen Lund’s orchestration of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. This time, it was Simen Lund’s arrangement of Grieg’s popular 3rd Violin Sonata and an orchestral version of Amy Beach’s Romance for Violin and Piano Op. 23. So, there was a nice sense of discovery here, and even the more familiar Mozart Symphony No. 29 that ended the concert offered a feeling of experiment too.
The Grieg arrangement was a genuine success, attentively executed by the VSO and quite exciting in its sweep. One of the major challenges in orchestration is not undoing the natural motion in the original version for violin and piano. This was achieved by a very tight integration of the solo violin and strings, making the work’s design more in the spirit of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante (or, much later, Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia) rather than a violin concerto as such. Yet Kraggerud nicely broke the texture with Grieg’s tender expressive passages, such as the second subject of the opening movement and the opening of the Allegretto, giving them full due without ever impeding the music’s progress. It was the judicious balance between the tender and the assertive that made this performance work, and gave the feeling that Simen Lund’s arrangement was only adding colour and dramatic force to the emotional content of the original. One could see the piece as quintessentially Grieg, with perhaps the same scale as the Holberg Suite or Lyric Suite, and a last movement (with its energetic ‘trolls’) which parallels the playful feelings in both these works. As we have come to expect, Kraggerud’s solo contribution was beautifully etched and balanced, probing the inward depths in the lyrical moments with great purity, but fully incisive when the music’s turbulence came to the fore.
It is interesting to note that this treatment differed from the violinist’s 2015 Naxos recording with his Tromsø Chamber Orchestra, where he recorded all three of Grieg’s violin sonatas under the title ‘concertos’ with the same orchestral arrangement. There, the interpretative effort was in the other direction: to open up expanded space to give the soloist a typical 19th century expressive palette. But this strategy tended to disperse concentration and coherence, and in the 3rd sonata in particular, the slower speeds moved the expression outside Grieg, perhaps in the direction of the Bruch or Glazunov concertos. In the current version, everything was faster and tighter, and this includes the slow movement, where the earlier speeds were at risk of sentimentalizing its lovely lines.
The arrangement that opened the concert was by Amy Beach (1867-1944), and it is always good to hear more of her. As one of America’s most well-known female musical pioneers, indeed almost completely self-taught, she has received recognition for almost a half-century now, perhaps dating from when pianist Mary Louise Boehm rediscovered and recorded her Piano Concerto (alongside her Piano Quintet) in the early 1970s. Her ‘Gaelic’ Symphony has a strong following, as increasingly do her works for violin and piano, the crowning glory being her Violin Sonata Op. 34 (1896). The shorter Op. 23 Romance dates from three years earlier and, in the version with piano, is a very touching, personal composition with strong emotional radiance. While some of the themes might initially appear sentimental, the piece is developed with such natural ease and fluency that one can easily fall for it. In the orchestral arrangement, a harp is added to augment colour.
I was unfortunately less taken by this orchestration. While the duo version succeeds by conveying an intimacy of expression, the opulence of the orchestral version forces the violinist’s approach to be more public. The consequence is that the work’s many yearning phrases seem somewhat overwrought and over-sweet, a posture that is difficult to sustain over the length of the piece. Perhaps the VSO was responsible to some degree: their playing was on the heavy side and the bottom strings sometimes seemed diffuse. Surely, lighter and transparent string textures and a refined sense of dynamics are what’s needed. The harp also had difficulty cutting through this texture, though amends were made when Kraggerud and the VSO’s new harpist Alyssa Katahara got together for a delicious little duo at the end of the first half of the concert.
The closing Mozart Symphony No. 29 was an interesting experiment too, employing period scale (about 20 strings with wind band) but modern instruments. There are a plethora of shades to what one can mean by ‘authentic’ Mozart these days. According to the violinist, this one considers a small gathering of virtuoso players of Mozart’s time playing the symphony with a strong penchant to find both passion and ‘dance’ in the music. As compared with the more fluid and sunnier traditional performances (lovely as they are), this one certainly had a spikier, darker hue with greater dramatic projection.
The first movement of the symphony was especially interesting, since after setting the gentle opening motive in place, all the subsequent tuttis had the intensity that one finds in the composer’s dark G minor symphony, No. 25. The approach worked surprisingly well, giving a sense of a conflict between sunlight and a threatening darkness not usually present in more graceful accounts, and linking the two symphonies in a way I had not previously recognized. Nonetheless, the two middle movements seemed unsettled. The Andante started from a spikier presentation than usual, but was not sustained well, forcing a number of unmarked tempo increases. The Minuet, with its dotted rhythms and staccato phrases, fit perfectly with the objective of eliciting sharp dance accents but the integration with the Trio did not seem fluent enough. The finale was designed as the highlight, almost volcanic in its push, speed and volume, seemingly demonstrating the triumph of unbridled joy over the undercurrents exposed in the opening movement. While the drama and size of this type of interpretation will clearly divide opinion, it does have a genuine grounding, and I thought it was quite revealing. I think the orchestra really enjoyed playing the symphony without its traditional shackles on, though this rendering was not a fully-finished product.
The outing was a very enjoyable adventure all told, and certainly a nice addition to the Kraggerud brand of concert presentation, a topic he has thought long and hard about over the years.
© Geoffrey Newman 2023