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Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, an "eccentric super-talented maestro", conducts SWR Symphonieorchester in Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (viola plays Antoine Tamestit), and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No.5 in E minor, Op.64. The concert recorded at Liederhalle Stuttgart, on December 14, 2018.

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1985 was a watershed year in Alfred Schnittke's life, in good ways and bad. It was a tremendously prolific year, seeing the composition of some of Schnittke's most famous, personality-defining works – his String Trio, his Third Concerto Grosso, the first two movements of his First Cello Concerto, and his Viola Concerto. However, these works seem to have come at a cost: soon after the completion of the Trio, Schnittke suffered his first serious strokes. This catastrophic turn would have immense effect: just as Schnittke's work was entering a kind of "archetype" stage, it would shift radically. Everything after that fateful year, as Schnittke remarked in 1988, would now be different.

This proclamation, coming after such a blow, leaves those works of 1985 with an inevitable hue, an unsettling force of premonition and farewell. Certainly this tone hangs heavy over the Viola Concerto, perhaps Schnittke's single most famous work. Its success was due in no small part to the advocacy of its dedicatee, Russian violist Yuri Bashmet; Bashmet's extraordinary performances of the concerto achieved a certain fame on their own. However, Bashmet also seems to have captured a new, confessional desperation of tone; he played the part of an great actor, in a work which comes closer to theater than almost other musical work of Schnittke's.

The Viola Concerto revisits many of Schnittke's standard concerto formulae. There is its three-part form, the role of its three movements-a slow, loose introductory movement, presenting the work's main materials, a second movement which hurls violently toward fatality through an array of styles, and a lugubrious lament-finale, which assembles the previous shards into a painful farewell-plaint.

The materials Schnittke uses contain a new depth, and a hint of biography as well. After the famous opening motive, based on Bashmet's name, we hear a wide arching melody on viola accompanied by low strings (Schnittke does this work without violins). In its throaty, charred tone, its bottomless and searching sorrow, it treads the mire like the blacker passages in Dostoyevsky; it's shot through with Russian excess, pathos, and pride, and testifies nobly to that side of Schnittke's heritage. After a cataclysmic outburst, we also hear a small cadential figure, a fairy-tale from the Viennese woods right out Schubert; and this confession comes from Schnittke's other side, his German heritage. These sides, the Russian-confessional and the German-constructive, will determine the trajectory of the rest of the concerto.

The second movement is vintage Schnittke, a nightmare-train hurtling towards its inevitable wreck. We encounter garishly colorful characters and episodes: the martial constantly flows into the wanton and reckless. Barracks mix with booze, marches with waltzes, and all veer towards a kind of irresistibly repugnant luxuriance. In one notorious passage, the violist is seduced, then coerced, into revisiting the Schubert-passage from the first movement; the little motive spins and spins from nostalgic reminiscence into noxious souvenir. Seldom has Schnittke so well orchestrated the shift from youthful morbidity to withered corpse. Eventually the soloist is dealt his death-blow in a sonic boom both tragic and trashy.

This sad filth overflows into the finale, where the violist weaves out an interior death-song of great scope. The sweep of this movement is clearly epic, a collection of memories and laments for losses. The tone is again Russian, and eventually attains the steady inertia of a funeral procession. The coda is one of the most nauseatingly drawn-out in all of Schnittke, a dwindling out of the flame as oddly effective as it is uncompromising; as Bashmet plays it, it's a Shakespearean death-soliloquy entering a cryogenic coffin.

Source: Seth Brodsky (allmusic.com)

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Tchaikovsky composed the Symphony No.5 in E minor, Op.64, between May and the end of August 1888, and conducted its premiere at St Petersburg on November 17 of that year. Eleven years separated the "fateful" Fourth Symphony of 1877 from the Fifth, about which Tchaikovsky expressed ambivalent feelings both during its composition and later on. To his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, he wrote in August 1888 that "it seems to me I have not failed, and that it is good". After conducting it in Prague, however, he wrote "...It is a failure; there is something repellent, something superfluous and insincere that the public instinctively recognizes". Yet by March he could write: "I like it far better now".

By no means did Tchaikovsky neglect the orchestra between 1877 (when he committed, in his words, the "rash act" of marriage) and 1888. He composed four wholly charming and fanciful suites, of which the second and third could have passed as symphonies had he chosen to call them that. Furthermore, he wrote the unnumbered but inspired Manfred Symphony in 1885. Yet Tchaikovsky never found symphonic structure as congenial as opera or ballet. His method was closer to Liszt's tone-poem procedure than to the Austro-German heritage, continued by Brahms and Bruckner among his contemporaries. Tchaikovsky favored sequences (in his case, the iteration and reiteration of four-bar cells) over enharmonic evolution. Listeners who've sometimes found his music as irritating as he found Brahms' tend do so because of sequence overload, finding that such repeated gestures result in an overblown effect. His greatest gifts were melody and orchestration: witness the popular songs plagiarized from his music, such as "Moon Love", cribbed from the slow movement of Symphony No.5.

Like the Fourth, the Symphony No.5 is unified by a six-measure "Fate" motto, heard straightaway in a darkly colored Andante introduction until, after a pause, the body of the opening 4/4 movement becomes a sonata-form Allegro con anima (with "soul" as well as spirit). It builds to a ferocious fortissimo climax before ending gloomily. Tchaikovsky marked this melodically rich slow movement Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza (songfully unhurried, with some freedom). In D major basically, it is a 12/8 sonatina (exposition and reprise), with an elaborate three-part song structure replacing the development section. Its special glory is the solo-horn arietta looted by "Moon Love", although the ominous motto theme from the first movement interrupts twice – like the Commendatore's Statue answering Don Giovanni's invitation to dinner.

The quasi-scherzo third movement is a waltz in A major out of Tchaikovsky's top balletic drawer, with a trio in F sharp minor plus a long coda that reprises the motto, now in 3/4 time. Germanic academics were scandalized by the presence of a waltz in a numbered symphony, but not Brahms, who stayed over in Hamburg to hear a rehearsal, and during a bibulous lunch with Tchaikovsky the day after praised the first three movements.

The motto launches the last movement as it did the first, but now in E major, Andante maestoso, leading to another sonata-allegro construct – this one vivace rather than moderato, with an alla breve meter that keeps it moving. At the end of the reprise, Tchaikovsky writes six B major chords – a false cadence that invariably provokes applause – before the motto, now bedecked in alb and fanon, launches a major-key coda as long as the entire development section. It quickens to a Presto dash for the double bar before broadening at the very end for a triumphantly sonorous tetrad of "end-of-file" chords.

Source: Roger Dettmer (allmusic.com)

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

♪ Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (1985)

i. Largo
ii. Allegro molto
iii. Largo

Encore:

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

♪ Sarabande

Antoine Tamestit, viola

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

♪ Symphony No.5 in E minor, Op.64 (1888)

i. Andante – Allegro con anima
ii. Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza
iii. Valse. Allegro moderato
iv. Finale. Andante maestoso – Allegro vivace

SWR Symphonieorchester
Conductor: Teodor Currentzis

Liederhalle Stuttgart, December 14, 2018

(HD 1080p)

Antoine Tamestit is recognised internationally as one of the great violists – soloist, recitalist and chamber musician. He has been described as possessing "a flawless technique, and combines effortless musicality with an easy communicative power" (Bachtrack). In addition to his peerless technique and profound musicianship, he is known for the depth and beauty of his sound with its rich, deep, burnished quality. His repertoire is broad, ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary, and he has performed and recorded several world premieres.

In the 2018-2019 season, Tamestit is Artist-in-Residence SWR Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart with which he will perform the Schnittke, Walton and Hoffmeister concerti. He will also play/direct the orchestra in a programme of Bach, Hindemith, Britten and Brahms. Elsewhere this season, he will tour the US with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and will appear as Gardiner's soloist with the orchestra of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He returns to the London Symphony Orchestra, and will perform with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Dresden Saatskapelle, Orchestre de Paris in Paris and on tour, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra. In recital and chamber music, he will appear at the Berlin Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall, Vienna Konzerthaus, Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels and the Prinzregententheater in Munich.

Since giving the world premiere performance of Jörg Widmann's Viola Concerto in 2015 with the Orchestre de Paris and Paavo Järvi, Tamestit has given performances of the concerto with the co-commissioners, Swedish Radio Symphony and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, both under Daniel Harding, again with the Orchestre de Paris, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Stavanger Symphony, and the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Tamestit has also appeared as soloist with orchestras such as the Czech Philharmonic, Tonhalle Orchestra Zürich, WDR Köln, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Philharmonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He has worked with many great conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Valery Gergiev, Riccardo Muti, Daniel Harding, Marek Janowski, Antonio Pappano, François-Xavier Roth and Franz Welser-Möst.

Antoine Tamestit is a founding member of Trio Zimmermann with Frank Peter Zimmermann and Christian Poltera. Together they have recorded a number of acclaimed CDs for BIS Records and played in Europe's most famous concert halls and series. Other chamber music partners include Nicholas Angelich, Gautier Capucon, Martin Fröst, Leonidas Kavakos, Nikolai Lugansky, Emmanuel Pahud, Francesco Piemontesi, Christian Tetzlaff, Cédric Tiberghien, Yuja Wang, Jörg Widmann, Shai Wosner and the Ebene and Hagen Quartets.

Antoine Tamestit records for Harmonia Mundi and released the Widmann Concerto, recorded with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Harding in February 2018. The recording was selected as Editor's Choice in BBC Music Magazine. His first recording on Harmonia Mundi was Bel Canto: The Voice of the Viola, with Cédric Tiberghien released in February 2017. Tamestit's distinguished discography includes Berlioz's Harold en Italie with the London Symphony Orchestra and Valery Gergiev for LSO Live; for Naïve he has recorded three Bach Suites, Hindemith solo and concertante works with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and Paavo Järvi; and an earlier recording of Harold in Italy with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre. In 2016 he appeared with Frank Peter Zimmermann and the Chamber Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on a new recording of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante (Hännsler Classic).

Tamestit's other world premiere performances and recordings include Thierry Escaich's La Nuit Des Chants in 2018, the Concerto for Two Violas by Bruno Mantovani written for Tabea Zimmermann and Tamestit, and Olga Neuwirth's Remnants of Songs. Works composed for Tamestit also include Neuwirth's Weariness Heals Wounds and Gérard Tamestit's Sakura.

Together with Nobuko Imai, Antoine Tamestit is co-artistic director of the Viola Space Festival in Japan, focusing on the development of viola repertoire and a wide range of education programmes.

Born in Paris in 1979, Antoine Tamestit studied with Jean Sulem, Jesse Levine, and with Tabea Zimmermann. He was the recipient of several coveted prizes including first prize at the ARD International Music Competition, the William Primrose Competition and the Young Concert Artists (YCA) International Auditions, as well as BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists Scheme, Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award and the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award in 2008.

Tamestit has taught at both the Cologne Hochschule für Musik and Paris Conservatoire, and regularly gives masterclasses worldwide.

Antoine Tamestit plays on a viola made by Stradivarius in 1672, loaned by the Habisreutinger Foundation.

Source: intermusica.co.uk