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"In the Footsteps of
Their Forefathers"
Haaretz, Wednesday, February 03, 2010
by Noam Ben Zeev
Tchaikovsky's music has not become obsolete.
His works, like those of his contemporaries Chekhov
and Dostoyevsky, have endured beyond the time and
place of their creation, and every performance
brings new revelations for the listener. With the
entrance of the solo horn in the second movement of
the Fifth Symphony, and as the movement develops
with ever-increasing intensity and pathos towards
the climax and then recedes, all the senses exclaim:
here is a masterpiece! Especially in such a splendid
performance as yesterday's, by the Symphony
Orchestra of the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music (the
Tel Aviv Academy), whose members played like angels
in this movement, and Mehta conducted them with
perfection, making them into a real orchestra – and
an excellent one, at that.
Despite this, throughout the concert, an
all-Tchaikovsky program, including the Violin
Concerto in a wonderful performance by the young
Finnish soloist Petteri Iivonen, a strange feeling
pervaded, as if this were a weird dream or theatre
of the absurd. Tchaikovsky was not presented here
from the perspective of musicians who know
Stravinsky and Bartok, Takamichu and Penderecki,
Louis Andriessen and Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna
and Arvo Pärt. No. It was clear that this was these
students' world, the aesthetic and spiritual world
of the 19th century; as if the stylistic
and tonal earthquake of the 20th century
was shaken off as from a Teflon surface, without
leaving a trace.
Good Lord, in a few years the members of this
orchestra will be musicians born in the 21st
century. Will they also skip back two centuries in
time, under Mehta's conducting, and be stuck in
Tchaikovsky? Or will they stomp their feet and
demand to live in the present? Will their professors
turn their backs to educational responsibility and
raise them to be deaf and blind to their own period
in order to play like their ancestors?
The event was impressive. Mehta spoke with his
usual charm. Josef Buchmann, whose donation of
millions redeemed the Academy and financed full
tuition for all of the participants, granted
scholarships. The Mann Auditorium was full, and the
performance was wonderful. However, the aftertaste
was bitter, as it always is when one partakes in an
event lacking significance.
The Symphony Orchestra of the Buchmann-Mehta School of
Music.
Program: Tchaikovsky. Conductor: Zubin Mehta;
Soloist: Petteri Iivonen, violin.
(Translation: Bilha Rubinstein)
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