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The Scotsman, 14. August 2002 |
Martin Parker |
Liszt: Faust Symphony, Edinburgh 2002
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Faust Symphony
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MUSIC: Usher Hall |
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WE HAVE the 19th century to thank for many
things - great municipal engineering projects, natural selection and the
classical concert tradition. It is through music that we glimpse the
vastness of the 19th-century mindset. Lizst’s Faust Symphony, for example,
is an ambitious and uncompromising statement of self-belief and faith in the
culture of his time. To modern ears, its somewhat bloated proportions don’t
really inspire. The work’s three movements depict the main characters of
Goethe’s telling of the Faust myth: Faust himself, then Gretchen, and
finally the complex and fearsome persona of Mephistopheles.
The RSNO under the statesmanlike baton of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky made an
enormous noise, the heavy brass pumping big chords into the Usher Hall,
augmented at the end by the men of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, tenor
Jonas Kaufmann and an electrically powered organ with eight huge
loudspeakers. But for all this brilliance the concert was ideologically
un-moving. Beethoven’s Overture The Ruins of Athens ended just as it seemed
to get going and Lizst’s Fantasy on the same theme with Victoria Postnikova
on pyrotechnic piano again gave us virtuosity but little else. |
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