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Rhapsodic Joy at Teatro Colón Buenos Aires
Teatro Colón
10/06/2025 - & October 7 (Montevideo), 9 (Lima), 14, 16 (Mexico), 2025
Franz Schubert: Overture in C major “In The Italian Style”, D. 591
Ludwig van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61
Felix Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A major “Italian”, Op. 90
James Ehnes (violin)
Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Riccardo Minasi (conductor)
R. Minasi, J. Ehnes
(© Liliana Morsia para el Mozarteum Argentino)
Created in 1952, the Mozarteum Argentino is one of Argentina and Latin America’s leading music organizations. The present concert was part of its annual season of concerts held at the venerable Teatro Colón, itself inaugurated in 1908, the most attractive opera house in the Americas, replete with a glorious history rivalling Europe’s greatest musical meccas. In addition to its well-attended programming, the Mozarteum Argentino offers concerts in the provinces through branches it’s established countrywide. It also provides scholarships to musicians and composers to study abroad as well as initiatives for musicians from the provinces to study in Buenos Aires.
The highly-acclaimed Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen returned to the Teatro Colón for its fourth visit with a well‑chosen program of Austro‑German early Romantic music. It opened with Schubert’s Overture in C major “In the Italian Style”, an appropriately light piece that evokes the Italian bel canto style, especially that of Donizetti. Italian conductor Riccardo Minasi showed his affinity for that idiom and brought out its elegance and ballabile rhythms.
The programme’s main work was Beethoven’s venerable Violin Concerto in D major. Premiered in 1806, the concerto was not a success until four decades later, when Joseph Joachim (1831‑1907) revived it under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. Since then, it’s become one of the top violin works in the repertoire.
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, despite its being one of the most popular, eschews the dazzling bravado of the other major violin concertos as well as Beethoven’s own piano works. Instead, it’s a more interiorized piece, where the violin merely collaborates with the orchestra to create a deeply serene and reflective masterpiece. Indeed, this is what Canadian violinist James Ehnes and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen delivered.
The first movement, Allegro ma non troppo, is in the form of a sonata with two themes. The first, introduced by four soft timpani, becomes a recurring theme that the soloist later develops. Riccardo Minasi’s attention to the subtle introduction of the first theme and the subsequent blending with the second was masterful. The soloist’s entrance arrives much later, possibly the longest wait of any familiar violin concerto. This was indeed magical, especially with a violinist of Ehnes’s calibre, whose discreet entrance was followed by the cadenza, from which the two themes are presented by the violin. The main theme is repeated by various sections of the orchestra to become a haunting leitmotif. This first movement is unusually long, about twenty‑five minutes in a forty five minute concerto, yet thanks to the elegance of Minasi’s conducting, one wished it were longer. Thanks to the intimate collaboration between violinist and conductor, there was no hint of rigidity and the entire first movement was a solemn yet fluid affair.
The slow second movement, Larghetto, evoked bucolic images. The violin develops on a single theme that’s decoratively repeated in several variations that Ehnes brilliantly rendered in different colours. In sharp contrast, the third and last movement, Rondo, is an explosion of joy, comparable only to Symphony No. 7 in Beethoven’s output. The violin plays a lively theme that’s repeated by the orchestra. Here, Minasi showed his delicate mastery in the elegant and brilliant repeated passages following the concerto’s most beautiful moment, where the melody, played in G minor, passes from the violin to the bassoon. Then, the virtuoso “cadenza” is played. Ehnes played Fritz Kreisler’s cadenza with total ease, but with no attempt to technically dazzle; musicality and lyricism were his prime objectives.
As Ehnes had favoured musicality over virtuosity in the concerto, even in the cadenza, he demonstrated his dazzling technique in his chosen encore, Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 3 “Ballade”, a demanding virtuoso piece that he performed effortlessly.
The second part of the program featured Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A major “Italian”, an adroit choice, given the pivotal role Mendelssohn had played in resurrecting Beethoven’s Violin Concerto four decades after its premiere. Moreover, it was a work of “Italian” inspiration, as was Schubert’s opening work.
Like Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony “Scottish”, the Fourth was a result of his travels around Europe. It’s descriptive; Italy’s joyous atmosphere and vivid colours are distinctly palpable. The first movement, Allegro vivace, evokes the bluster in Berlioz’s Carnaval romain (1843), and was indeed written in Rome. It contrasts with the subdued second movement, Andante con moto, inspired by a religious procession witnessed in Naples. The third movement, Con moto moderato, is a minuet. Finally, the fourth and last movement, Presto, is inspired by Italian folkloric dances, the Roman saltarello and the Neapolitan tarantella. Despite Mendelssohn’s efforts at being descriptive, the symphony sounds nothing like Italy to an Italian listener, with the possible exception of the last movement, which expresses his first impressions of the country that made him feel joyful and energized. Minasi, an Italian, certainly managed to communicate this euphoria, ending the evening – most appropriately – in rhapsodic joy.
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