Extensive UK excursions by orchestras from the EU are, one suspects, more likely to be rarities for a while to come back. A mixture of the lingering penalties of the pandemic and the additional layers of forms imposed by Brexit make the organisation of such undertakings rather more difficult, so the present six-date tour by the Zagreb Philharmonic – its first go to since 1974 – is slightly exceptional.
Jan Latham-Koenig is the conductor for all of the live shows, which embrace music by Croatia’s most acquainted composer, Dora Pejačević, alongside repertory works by Sibelius and Mahler. The tour-opener, within the slightly vibrant, generally unforgiving acoustic of the Anvil, prompt that the Zagreb orchestra is a feisty, extremely completed band, which greater than compensated for its occasional lack of tonal refinement with an vitality and vividness that Latham-Koenig exploited in his efficiency of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was very a lot an interpretation offered in daring, main colors, with out an excessive amount of subtlety however with very loud, nearly brash climaxes which allowed the brass rather more probability to say itself than the orchestra’s woodwind.
That assertiveness did lead to some issues of stability, and in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, too, there have been passages by which the soloist, Tamsin Waley-Cohen, needed to combat only a bit too arduous to make her finely chiselled lyricism heard. However the normal profile of her method – extreme and brisk within the first two actions, much more unbuttoned within the finale – got here throughout clearly, even when a few of the particulars have been obscured.
4 of Pejačević’s orchestral songs, sung by the soprano Marija Vidović, had opened the live performance. Settings from 1915 of poems by Karl Kraus and Rilke are formidable late romantic essays, with Strauss and maybe Zemlinsky as their stylistic references, whereas the 2 Butterfly Songs, composed in 1920 simply three years earlier than Pejačević’s demise on the age of 38, are charming miniatures, composed with the lightest of touches, which Vidović offered with simply the best mixture of tact and appeal.
On the Royal Live performance Corridor, Nottingham on 8 April, and touring till 14 April.
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