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<\/a><\/p>\nMatthias Pintscher<\/p>\n
(http:\/\/www.limelightmagazine.com.au\/live-reviews\/review-romantic-visions-sydney-symphony-orchestra)<\/p>\n
CHETANA NAGAVAJARA<\/p>\n
Matthias Pintscher is a composer and a conductor. He directs the Ensemble Intercontemporain<\/i> in Paris, which Pierre Boulez founded in 1976 to promote contemporary music. His conducting of the Berlin Philpharmonic Orchestra that I witnessed in the evening of 13 September 2015 showed great promise. Will he one day attain status in both capacities as the distinguished Pierre Boulez? In Thai we have an untranslatable expression, \u201cSia Khon\u201d, which can be roughly rendered into English as \u201cto lose your human qualities\u201d, actually implying the loss of humility or being overly absorbed in one\u2019s own (imagined) greatness. Will Matthias Pitscher be able to maintain his integrity as a musician in a world that can lead you astray at any moment? His performance last night made me feel optimistic. There was a kind of sobriety that pervaded his music making, something totally lacking in the star conductor Nelsons. A German working in France, if he is sensitive to the cultural environment, is bound to learn much. His interpretation of the French repertoire demonstrated that he had formed a concept, not only of the individual compositions, but also of French music. Nietzsche\u2019s dictum, \u201cWe must miditerraneanize music\u201d, was not taken by Pintscher at face value: the sunbathed brightness of the South was mollified by a Nordic temperance. His Debussy was exquisite. I shall come to that later.<\/p>\n
I did make a remark in connection with the concert by the South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra that immersion in modern and contemporary music could prove to be a boon to musicians who know how to put that kind of experience to good use, especially when tackling the classical repertoire. Pintscher had no strictly classical work on the programme last night, but his reading of the first piece, Gabriel Faur\u00e9\u2019s Pell\u00e9as et M\u00e9lisande <\/i>(a third version of the same theme performed at this Music Festival, the other two being those by Sch\u00f6nberg and Debussy) proved beyond any doubt that he had no <\/i>intention of romanticizing Romanticism<\/i>. By sheer accident, the orchestra he had under his direction was the Berlin Philharmonic (well-known for its own strength of character and occasional resistance to a conductor\u2019s guidance), and its woodwinds could never, never realize the kind of sound \u2013 warm and opulent \u2013 usually associated with the French tradition. So this tone poem was narrated, not as a drama with an acerbic theme, but a musical understatement<\/i>, a rumination on the fate of the hapless protagonists. I am in favour of such an interpretation, for after all Maeterlinck did not want to have everything clear-cut to start with.<\/p>\n
At this stage of the concert, I was wondering why Pintscher\u2019s name did not come up during the long-drawn process of selection of the successor to Simon Rattle at the helm of the Berlin Phil.. Perhaps they wanted to see him grow as a composer rather than a conductor. His second Violin Concerto<\/i> with the Hebrew name of mar\u2019eh<\/i> was conducted at this concert by the composer, with the French violinist Renaud Capu\u00e7on as the soloist. The Hebrew word, according to the composer, means \u201ccountenance\u201d, and the meaning can be extended to signify \u201cthe aura of a face, a beautiful apparition, something wonderful\u201d. The composer adheres to this concept throughout the work. It reflects the brighter side of life. And there\u2019s the rub. How does a composer exploit the potential of the \u201cking of instruments\u201d to substantiate such a concept? In connection with the solo instrument, Pintscher related that he had been fascinated by the playing of Julia Fischer and wished to explore the expressive power of the violin. He himself had learned the violin and the Concerto<\/i> was very, very violinistic. But the concept governing the work had to be translated into a composition, and the composer was completely absorbed in the effort of creating sounds from the violin that would respond to his programmatic thinking. The virtuosity was there, like all contemporary compositions for the violin, for most soloists of today have mastered the various facets of the violin technique while still studying in their respective academies. Pintscher had a predilection for the higher register and left the lower register in the cold. Why has he not learned from Bach how to exploit the full potential of the instrument, one would be tempted to ask? We might be enthralled with the tone colours, the ambience created by the composer, the dialogue between the solo violin and the orchestra, but there was little substance<\/i> that we could grasp.<\/p>\n