RDS, Dublin
TC Kelly – O’Carolan Suite in Baroque Style.
Timo Alakotila – Sketches from Folkscenes.
Vivaldi – Four Seasons.
If Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is anything, he is an individualist. Anyone interested in straight down the line, middle of the road music-making, would be well advised to give him a wide berth. Kuusisto cuts his own furrow, follows a line that leads him in some unusual directions, and at times seems to derive his greatest pleasure from taking extravagant diversions along the way.
His concert with the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the RDS on Saturday was very much an evening of two halves. The first offered works of music about music, a 20th-century Irish view of the baroque, and a 21st-century Finnish view of folk fiddling.
Kuusisto took TC Kelly (1917-85, father of the ICO’s chief executive John Kelly) very much at his word in interpreting the word baroque in the title
O’Carolan Suite in Baroque Style
. Rather than highlighting the Carolan, Kuusisto presented the pastiche with, as it were, impeccably stylish baroque credentials – slightly nasal tone, minimal vibrato, sharply-etched rhythm.
He was as thoroughly consistent in conveying Finnish folk-fiddling flavour with virtuoso aplomb in
Sketches from Folkscenes
by his fellow-countryman Timo Alakotila (born 1959).
But what did poor Vivaldi do to deserve the mauling Kuusisto chose to inflict on the
Four Seasons
? Kuusisto took to various aspects of the music – references to birds, the barking of dogs, or the sleeping of a drunkard – with all the gusto and thoroughness of a man who would feel compelled to bring some kind of 21st-century verisimilitude to the countryside of Beethoven’s
Pastoral Symphony
and Berlioz’s
Symphonie fantastique
, or improve on the depiction of sheep in Strauss’s
Don Quixote.
You could view the exercise as parody or travesty, or the triumph of unbridled imagination over common sense. But there was no gainsaying the skill and commitment with which it was all done, and the members of the ICO were Kuusisto’s obedient servants all the way. If only the piece that Vivaldi actually wrote had had been allowed a greater bearing on the proceedings.
