Never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth. The biggest reason I was here (apart from the shopping and the makan) was all the superlative things I've heard about Leonidas Kavakos and his seen-to-be-believed violinistic prowess. The tale, as it goes, was Kavakos playing the Brahms last season to a somewhat indifferent first-night audience, only to find the second and third performances sold out when word got out about this amazing unknown virtuoso. Furthermore, I've had his Sibelius recording for a time and liked a few things about it, so this seemed like a worthwhile trip to make.

Corporations - Bane or Boon Most arts groups are dependent on corporate funding. But not all corporations, it seems, understand what drives the arts. The value of the money and the value of artistic empathy are two different things, and both are seldom reciprocated. Is this a necessary evil which the arts have to put up with ? The tender Larghetto of the Beethoven was all but spoiled by the audience. Where we were seated, we were in close proximity to corporate clients of a certain brand-name company holding an event for its hoity-toity members (the women were practically indistinguishable from marmosets dripping pearls, pungently reeking). This was a crowd who thought that the cadenza was the perfect time to share a joke, shake their feet and tap their fingers on the backs of seats. They coughed, they sneezed, they couldn't give a flying fruitcake about the music-making on stage. Is this too high a price to pay for the benefits to the arts, or is there yet hope for the corporate community?

It was. From the opening quadruplet timpani beats, the Beethoven was crafted as a textbook performance between Kavakos and MPO Associate Conductor Kevin Field, standing in for an indisposed Kees Bakels, and proving to be a more-than-able replacement. Looking like a stern Schauspieldirektor on stage, Kavakos negotiated the tortuous melodic lines of the first movement with consummate ease, showing off the luscious timbre of his Falmouth Stradivarius. Kavakos's execution of the Kreisler cadenza was as flawless as any this side of the equator - only ruined by a lady in T25 who started talking in the middle of the cadenza.

The tempo marking of the first movement has always been tricky because of its subjectiveness, and at some points Kavakos was straining to get ahead of the ma non troppo which Field was scrupulously observing. I am reminded of more memorable performances of the Beethoven, notably Anne-Sophie Mutter's (3 June 1999) and a pre-doctoral Er Yenn Chwenn (17 Aug 1990), but none as technically clinical or insightfully valedictory as this.

The soloist-conductor relationship in the slow movement bordered on the telepathic, interspersed with muted audience honks and sneezes, which was especially evident in the pizzicato passages. What should have been compelling moments of seraphic beauty were ruined by the audience, notwithstanding Kavakos's impeccable intonation and gently persuasive music-making.

It is not often that the Inkpotters jointly and separately find a special affection for an album, but BIS's dual-version of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (BIS CD-500) is certainly one, an und für sich. Benjamin Chee goes backstage to talk to the man behind the bow, Leonidas Kavakos. Your musical background - How did you start learning music? I came from a musical family with a very strong folk tradition. My grandfather played folk music on the violin. He taught my father, who also played folk music as well - but he went to conservatory where learnt classical music. Then he taught me, so now I play the violin too - but only classical. I also went to a musical conservatory, and finished my studies at Indiana University in the USA, with (Josef) Gingold. Apart from the concerto circuit, do you also play recitals and chamber music? Yes, I have my own chamber music cycle in Athens at the Megaron, which I collaborate with others and we play together a few times every year. There are so many (musicians) I work with - Natalia Gutman, Kim Kashkashian, Nobuko Imai - and once I worked with Rostropovich. What is the chamber festival like? In Athens, we usually programme along a certain theme, or focus on a certain composer. It can be from very contemporary to very classical, and we perform across the entire spectrum. So are you an advocate of contemporary music? I'm very involved with modern music. I have commissioned a few works, including a new work from John Tavener for violin and orchestra, which should be ready by 2004 - if it's finished by then. What do you think about contemporary composers? Since Mozart's time, there have been so many composers which have not survived down to us, although they were all very well-known then, like Stamitz who worked at Mannheim. I would say that today, whoever gets the best PR gets played the most - I mean, we won't know until after 50, 100 years whether people will still remember you or not. Like Tan Dun, who just conducted his own Water Percussion Concerto at the Arts Festival. There was this piece I recently heard; I've just came from judging a composition competition in London, and there was this percussion concerto by someone whose name I ought to remember but can't recall now, and it was just simply amazing. I mean, it's percussion, you know - it shouldn't be music, but there it was. Could you tell us about the Sibelius recording? I was called in to replace someone else, it was that simple. They had originally already started recording it, and at one point, they reached 180 takes ! I mean, if you start counting 1-2-3 onwards it would take you how long to get to 180; imagine playing the same passage 180 times. They just couldn't get it. At that time, I was in the US and I received a fax. I thought about it and said, let's do it. It was about the end of October then, and we were supposed to record it in January - and then they said, you can't have the score! (laughs) Why not? You see, the original version of the Sibelius has not been made public. After the 1904 performances, the composer forbade it to be published, so we had to get permission from the Sibelius family in order to get the score and record the concerto. And since then I've only performed it once, in Birmingham, February 1999. Any recording projects, then? I've finished recording 2 CDs for ECM - an album of works by (Tigran) Mansurian, and another one by Ravel and Enesco, which includes the Tzigane, Impressions d'Enfance and the three Violin Sonatas. Both composers knew each other, so there's actually a connection between them. As you know, Enescu was a good pianist, great conductor and a fantastic composer - this is very strong programmatic music, which cleverly adopted for the violin. If you think Vivaldi - the Four Seasons for example - is impressionistic, Enescu's personal knowledge of violin technique made his music even more amazing, from the beggar in the street to amateur street musicians, as well as birds, storm and wind. I'm also working on another record with ECM with Bach and Stravinsky. This is part of my collaboration with the Camerata Salzburg, and we will record this one soon. How about your instrument? My Stradivarius is the Falmouth of 1692. It belonged to this English Earl whom it is named after, who had a fantastic collection of instruments. I personally feel that Stradivari is the ultimate in sound for violins - that is, you cannot get any better than that. If you consider that Beethoven's (violin) concerto was not written when this instrument was made, when music was being played baroque-style in small groups, it is remarkable that this same instrument, unchanged, can also play against a full orchestra.

In the fireworks of the final movement, Kavakos stood firm amidst the musical spectacle unfolding around him, two feet firmly planted on the ground, leaning to and fro, and taking at most one step forwards or back, and playing along with the orchestra in the tutti bits with a determinedly calculated athelectism. Predictably, there were individual moments of bravura from the orchestra, especially the horns, clarinets and bassoons. The latter complemented the soloist's passages with a romantic legato (rather than heavily accented), sharing but not stealing the limelight. The finishing cadenza was absolutely stupendous. The applause lasted twelve minutes and five curtain calls, but there was no encore forthcoming. A pity, I felt however, that the Schneiderhan recording (w/BPO and Jochum, DG 447403-2) was omitted from the list of recommended performances in the programme book.

After finding out from the ushers at the interval that Brazil had resoundingly thumped China four-nil, we went back into a significantly reduced audience. Apparently the corporates had had enough of a classical night out, having duly fulfilled their obligations and gone home to peel grapes or something.

That was to our benefit, though - the eclectic Shostakovich would have driven them up the wall and crucified them to it: the worst thing you can do to a Philistine is to force them to sit through good music, and the worst thing you can do to an anti-Philistine is to make them sit next to one. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against people striving for the ideal of mens sana in corpore sano etc - but I mean, talking in the middle of the soloist's cadenza. Like in American Psycho(the movie, not the book) that's practically begging for a wet noisy death.

Anyway. Andrew Huth has written of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony in which "to say that its tone is enigmatic is to say nothing more than it is typical of its creator". It is a granitic statement full of ironic undertones, not to mention cryptic allusions to Rossini and Wagner. One would readily appreciate that the quirky unpredictability of the work would be right up Kevin Field's alley. After all, Shostakovich, like Mahler and Bruckner, is not just a symphony, it's an experience, and true to form, Field delivered.

An acid first movement, with its schizophrenic turns and histrionic twists, was followed by a slow movement eloquently rendered by the Philharmonic: Adagio doesn't even begin to describe the underlying still-waters-run-deep tension of this (shall we say) rhapsody. Between each of the movements, some corporate holdouts signaled their presence by attempting to start the applause. The clarinet in the third movement was absolutely macabre against the drone of the bassoon duet, eliciting a jumpy, edge-of-seat feel to Shostakovich's essay. In the finale, the orchestral rendition of Wagner's "Fate" motif was almost Mahlerian in its inward-looking gesture of self-pity. If Field's chosen tempo was slightly on the slow side, perhaps we needed that time to ponder our way through the composer's discourse.

Conclusions ? Certainly the ruggedness of Shostakovich's writing was put over very potently by the virtuosic playing of the orchestra. It felt like you had been taken by the scruff of your neck, bruised and beaten black-and-blue by something ecstatically beautiful, and then left the better for it. Field deftly wove a steel-cabled spider's web out of the music, charged with high-wire daredevil voltage: wrenching you one way and another, but allowing no escape, forcing you to create your own moments of epiphany.

BENJAMIN CHEE wishes he brought his slingshot along.

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11.4.2002 © Benjamin Chee

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