Magnificent playing from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Washington DC — review

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Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid notes that it takes “light and shadow [to] explore the conundrum of bringing new life into the simultaneously beautiful and crumbling world”. She is referring to her experience of being pregnant and giving birth while undertaking a prestigious residency at the storied Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. But it could also serve as a metaphor for Sunday’s life-giving concert at Washington Performing Arts, which opened with her richly textured new orchestral work Body Cosmic.

The modest 28-year-old maestro Klaus Mäkelä was until a few years ago unknown outside his native Finland. Today he is chief conductor designate to both the Royal Concertgebouw and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, two of the world’s most esteemed ensembles, as well as chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and music director of the Orchestre de Paris (and a busy cellist in his own right). I am generally suspicious of any so-called wunderkind but, as it turns out, Mäkelä’s meteoric rise is not an accident of timing, nor clever career finagling from a press-savvy manager. Leading the Concertgebouw, he here gave a performance that was utterly instinctive and entirely musical.

Reid’s evocative sound-world, by turns evanescent and disturbing, liquid and filmic, was given space to breathe by the Concertgebouw, which has the collective intelligence to create unparalleled sonic subtleties. Rachmaninov’s mighty Symphony No 2 in E Minor was the concert’s second half, and Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw managed to make the ultra-familiar seem as box-fresh as the premiere we had just heard. They did this through sensitivity to phrasing, dynamics and tempi; a lack of complacency or flashiness; and a sense of creative unity that only comes with a willingness to submit to the humility of togetherness.

Between these magnificent offerings was Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No 2 in G Minor, written by the composer in 1935, when he was in exile from his beloved Russia. The soloist was Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili, who possesses ravishing tone, flawless technique and musical elegance. In combination with Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw, she found something raw, terrifying and tender.

The encore was a heartbreaking and heart-mending arrangement by Anders Hillborg of Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir”. Batiashvili has previously described playing Bach as “something spiritual” — “[he] makes you believe in something.” Well, yes. The audience left the concert hall a bit stunned, a bit changed, a bit remade.

★★★★★

washingtonperformingarts.org