An evening with Haydn
This year’s 13th arts festival, “March - Shevchenko’s Month,” featured a concert by student soloists and the student orchestra from the Kyiv-based Reinhold Gliere Music School. The concert, held at the Great Hall of the National Peter Tchaikovsky Music Academy of Ukraine, was under the baton of the Ukrainian conductor Allin Vlasenko and the German guest, maestro Herbert Goertz.
The program was dedicated to Haydn’s 275th anniversary and consisted exclusively of his works. Some of them were performed for the first time in Ukraine. Goertz presented his Kyiv colleagues with the score of the Concerto for piano and orchestra in G major, which was performed by 3rd-year student Svitlana Yevdokimova. The German conductor also brought with him the original text of Haydn’s 93rd Symphony, bearing the composer’s original touches (i.e., without the layers of later editions).
The students’ team looked dignified. These young musicians are just learning and once they acquire some experience, they will surely manage to get rid of certain shortcomings that marred the overall good impression (some irregularities in intonation) and find closer creative mutual understanding with the orchestra players and soloists.
The orchestra musicians easily coped with the technically difficult and virtuoso passages, and their performance was steadily reaching the point of an emotional no-return in terms of sound energy and variability of dynamic nuances and timbre colors. Joint efforts helped the soloists and the orchestra to become a true ensemble. The soloists were well prepared for a serious concert. There were no technical snags in their playing, while minor lapses, such as wrongly-played trills and other small slip-ups, could not eclipse the positive impression from the young musicians’ creative drive.
After the piano concerto, the audience heard the first part of the Concerto for violin and orchestra played by 3rd-year student Nadia Podkolzina. The first part of the concert ended with a brilliant performance by the Gliere School’s 4th-year student, trumpeter Oleksandr Shevchuk, winner of national and international competitions. His trumpet sounded clear and sonorous, yet soft. He played Part One of the Concerto for trumpet and orchestra.
During the second half of the concert, the audience had an opportunity to enjoy the skills of maestro Herbert Goertz: under his baton, the Gliere School’s symphony orchestra performed Haydn’s Symphony No. 93. Goertz is a renowned Haydn expert, and his interpretation is closest to the opus’s original features. The conductor used a division of orchestral groups that is somewhat unusual for us (but very common in Germany), which produces a distinctive sound balancing. The orchestra adjusted to the stage and carefully followed the German musician’s cues.
The German conductor has a rather fiery manner of conducting, and his exact and eloquent gestures clearly revealed to the players the nature and nuances of the music; they not only helped the orchestra feel the overall music beat but also energized the players.
A new team member always helps everybody muster their forces and produce the finest results. The symphony received an ovation, which raised Goertz’s spirits and spurred him to encore part of the cycle. This time around there was some onstage coquetry: during a quiet fragment the conductor hid behind the music stand. The success of this thematic concert inspires optimism, because to loving Haydn’s music is indicative of good taste.
