“Voyager 2 took this image of Saturn on Aug. 11, 1981, when the spacecraft was 9.1 million miles from Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)“
Friday, September 27, 2024
National Concert Hall, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, Ireland
Leonard Slatkin has been making an annual trip to Dublin for quite a few years. This time the NSO concert closed quietly and contentedly with Brahms Three, rarely allowed such a position. Leading up to the all-passion-spent conclusion, Slatkin led a vibrant first movement (with exposition repeat), moving along but not rushed, avoiding the autumnal tag this work sometimes attracts. It was joyously liberated, “Frei aber froh” indeed, Brahms’s motto, ‘Free but happy’, F-A♭-F to get the Symphony started. The middle movements were beautifully done, the first flowing and flexibly expressive, the second – taken attacca – poignantly nostalgic, fine horn and oboe solos, warm strings; and, similarly, straight into the Finale, dashing and dynamic, climactically focussed and sensitively distilled come the at-peace coda, although Brahms still had thirty-plus more opuses to write.
As centrepiece, Hugh Tinney played Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, less poetic in this work than some pianists (partly due to the rather dry-sounding solo instrument) if crisply accurate, and afforded a detailed and robust accompaniment, the bass line particularly productive. Tinney was more varied in the first-movement cadenza (the more-usual of Beethoven’s two – I’d hoped to write that Tinney had emulated Brendel and Gilels by playing the other one). The slow movement came off especially well, gruff strings pacified by a Parnassian piano, the two as-one come the close if shrugged off by the orchestra to cue a poised and determined Finale.
Opening the evening, the first performance of Voyager 130 by Daniel Slatkin, Leonard Slatkin’s son. The composer explains the title: “The 130 is in reference to Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 130. A recording of the Cavatina from the Quartet is included on the Voyager Golden Record. This connection served as the inspirational spark for the piece. It tells the story of Voyager, with snippets of melodic material from the Quartet sprinkled throughout as motifs, including one section where the first 8 measures are played outright.” There is also a three-part electronic element: “The first is a twinkling texture I designed on a synthesizer, to represent the computer systems on Voyager as it’s sitting on the launchpad. Second is from another part of the Golden Record — a series of greetings in various languages. And lastly is those same greetings and twinkling sounds, as well as sounds of nature, also on the Golden Record, but warped, reversed and time stretched, as at that point in the piece Voyager is supposed to be in deep space.” Voyager 130 starts immediately out of conductor-welcoming applause with the “twinkling” otherworldly sonorities, prefiguring something momentous on the horizon, the music powerfully suggestive – widescreen and Technicolor – the use of the ‘Cavatina’ suitably connecting to an historic exploratory adventure beyond Earth, wonderfully imaged in Slatkin’s music through a feel for something awesome and limitless. The thirteen-minute Voyager 130 is due soon with the orchestras of Lyon, St. Louis, and Detroit. I look forward to hearing it again.