Trumpet Overture - Mendelssohn
Triple Concerto (For Sarajevo) - James Wilson
Symphony No 5 - Tchaikovsky
James Wilson's new Triple Concerto, For Sarajevo, which had its premiere at the NCH last night, was commissioned by RTE to mark the composer's 75th birthday.
The piece was written for last night's team of soloists - Alan Smale (violin), Constantin Zanidache (viola), and Aisling Drury Byrne (cello) - and was inspired by a newspaper photograph of Vedran Smailovic playing his cello in the ruins of Sarajevo.
In spite of the war-ravaged setting, Wilson took a positive message from the image, seeing Smailovic as "a figure of hope, not of despair". By curious coincidence, and unbeknownst to the composer, Smailovic took up residence near Warrenpoint and came to Dublin during the week to meet the composer and attend the premiere of the work he had unknowingly inspired.
Odd as it may seem, the composer's spirit of optimism was but little felt at the premiere performance. Instead there was a sense of competition, of disorder, of confusion, even, in the coming together of soloists and orchestra.
In spite of a strong, timpaniled opening, and some pools of clarity in the most lightly-scored passages of the slow finale, the energies at work in this piece resulted in a greyly evolving flux. Conductor Colman Pearce, who joked about problems of balance in a pre-performance conversation with the composer, must shoulder some of the responsibility for lack of dynamic differentiation in the performance. Roughness and ill-controlled energy abounded in his performances of Mendelssohn's Trumpet Overture and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, both of which showed distressing headlong tendencies, the dynamics appearing to be limited by the natural ceilings of the various instruments, the restraint in the upward movement of tempo by the collective inclinations of the musicians.
