Classical Review
Chemistry lessons
by Peter Shaw
Does the NZSO’s youthful new musical director have the right stuff?
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s new music director, Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, officially takes up his appointment in January. There has been much comment on his youth. Journalists, typically anxious to prove that he is quite a normal young man, have made much of his schoolboy membership of a heavy metal band and prowess as a soccer player. Of his expertise as a professional violinist and a conductor since the age of 14, there has been less comment.
Without doubt, the NZSO has taken a risk. Still in his twenties, Inkinen ¬¬is very young to have achieved a musical directorship anywhere, even in a musical world where such appointments are regularly made as older figures pass on. It’s a braver one than we might have expected from an organisation that in the past has almost had to be bullied into a sense of adventure.
But this magnificent orchestra, underrated here and certainly internationally, has been in safe hands for long enough. Under James Judd, we heard many fine but overcautious performances, as though the conductor was reluctant to relinquish the reins.
NZSO talent scouts heard Inkinen first and were impressed in 2005 when he was working with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He attended the NZSO’s concerts at the London Proms, got the measure of the orchestra and was booked for January 2006 to record for Naxos two as yet unreleased CDs of recent music by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara.
Inkinen’s first major public appearances with the NZSO occurred only weeks ago when his appointment was announced to a public unfamiliar with his name.
They were not particularly distinguished concerts. Beethoven’s Fidelio overture was hectically rushed, while the Fifth Symphony was given a reading marked by conservative tempi and dullness.
In Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony Inkinen seemed more at home, although here, too, you sometimes had the feeling that major events in the music were upon us without adequate preparation. This raises the question as to whether the conductor realises how much more subtly his orchestra can play. Lucky for him, his soloist was the young piano star Freddy Kempf, whose marvellously idiosyncratic performances of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto and Prokofiev’s expansively difficult Second Concerto he accompanied with considerable skill.
Inkinen’s most recent appearances, in late July, were more successful, particularly in three works by his compatriot, Sibelius. The formal problems of musical architecture encountered in the Shostakovich symphony were in no way evident in as persuasive an account of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony as we have heard here in a long time. Inkinen’s risks with slower tempi paid off. His manipulation of the many textural subtleties in the early tone poem En Saga was extraordinarily sensitive. It was a nice idea to give Valse Triste as an unexpected encore. All this bodes well for Sibelius concerts in the future and for the recorded cycle of symphonies to be undertaken for Naxos.
The violin soloist in these concerts was the Canadian-born Leila Josefowicz, who looked like an angel but played with a reticence in both sound and rhythmical definition that was hardly suited to the profundities of Shostakovich’s great first Violin Concerto, though in the smaller Mendelssohn concerto she fared better. Inkinen made a superb job of the passacaglia third movement of the Shostakovich, keeping its accompaniment well forward so that the musical argument was never lost. This approach provided some breathtakingly lovely extended passages.
A second concert concluded with Stravinsky’s ¬The Rite of Spring, a work whose ferocity, rhythmical complexity and sheer level of volume make it a test for any orchestra and conductor. In this tidy performance all the elements were in place – the effect was, as ever, shattering – except that the last ounce of bite was perhaps missing.
No doubt as conductor and players grow into their relationship we will hear greater variety of colour, pace and texture. Inkinen believes that his job is to invite the best from his players by giving them freedom. He says that the chemistry is already there, although there is more to do before it is heard convincingly in the concert hall.
