Delightful experience yesterday afternoon, at the Royal College of Music.
We went to an inspiring rehearsal of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, with not one, but three excellent violinists, one for each movement: Emily Sun, Maria Gîlicel (who played a Stradivarius violin made in 1728), and Line Faber.
The acoustic in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall is wonderful, and the playing (as often with top student orchestras) was full of passion, energy, vigour, and total commitment.
The conductor, Mark Messenger, emphasised precision in the rhythmic details, and made intriguing points (as for example how Beethoven’s silences are very different from Mozart’s silences), and generally he strongly emphasised the improvisatory qualities of this concerto.
(This reminded me how years ago a filmmaker had asked me, as a composer, what I thought of improvisation. I told him that for me, the best notated music should sound like the best improvisation imaginable).
I particularly enjoy rehearsals like this one, as in them you experience the actual progress of composition of the music, its separate parts, its assemblage. In this rehearsal we were vividly presented with Beethoven’s huge variety of orchestral colours in this concerto, and his melodic vivacity, harmonic daring, rhythmic force: all the inner workings of inspired music, and music-making.
www.rcm.ac.uk/masterclasses and www.rcm.ac.uk/events
We went to an inspiring rehearsal of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, with not one, but three excellent violinists, one for each movement: Emily Sun, Maria Gîlicel (who played a Stradivarius violin made in 1728), and Line Faber.
The acoustic in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall is wonderful, and the playing (as often with top student orchestras) was full of passion, energy, vigour, and total commitment.
The conductor, Mark Messenger, emphasised precision in the rhythmic details, and made intriguing points (as for example how Beethoven’s silences are very different from Mozart’s silences), and generally he strongly emphasised the improvisatory qualities of this concerto.
(This reminded me how years ago a filmmaker had asked me, as a composer, what I thought of improvisation. I told him that for me, the best notated music should sound like the best improvisation imaginable).
I particularly enjoy rehearsals like this one, as in them you experience the actual progress of composition of the music, its separate parts, its assemblage. In this rehearsal we were vividly presented with Beethoven’s huge variety of orchestral colours in this concerto, and his melodic vivacity, harmonic daring, rhythmic force: all the inner workings of inspired music, and music-making.
www.rcm.ac.uk/masterclasses and www.rcm.ac.uk/events