<<  -- 4 --  David Wilkins    A WEEK TO REMEMBER

Vadim Repin playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto would be a highlight of any music festival. From the magical moment of his first entry to the sharply sprung rhythms of the finale, the technique, the tone, the identification were unquestionable. Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony got a fast and furious reading on the whole -- maybe a tad too unrelenting for my taste. Saraste did find, though, a very plaintive simplicity for the slow movement. The momentum and excitement of the finale's coda was only the last indication of an orchestra clearly determined to give the conductor their all. The ovation was as inevitable as it was deserved.

And so to Astor Piazzolla's Maria de Buenos Aires which received two concert performances by Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Musica. Critical honesty requires me to confess that I am in thrall to this piece to a degree that might well compromise sound judgement. Well -- I wouldn't be the first or the last and, for the time being, I'd rather be proud than ashamed of that enchantment! Leonid Desyatnikov, who arranged the work for Kremer's performances and recording, has written of its capacity to provoke obsession: 'We were all in such high spirits that we were unable to sleep either in the breaks between sessions or at night. A number of us couldn't stop singing Maria ...' (from the disc booklet Teldec 3984-20632-2). He makes a further admission: 'I can now see that I have got too close to this music and can recognise its shortcomings and weaknesses. But Humbert continues to love his ageing Lolita as much as ever before.' Gidon Kremer, who has done so much as foremost champion of this great Argentinian composer, is similarly honest. 'I have played just about everything, from Marcello to Vivaldi, all the way to the most recent compositions of Alfred Schnittke, John Adams and Luigi Nono -- but I have fallen in love with the music of Piazzolla.' (from the disc booklet of El Tango, Nonesuch 7559-79462-2)

Who is Maria de Buenos Aires? On one level, for those of us who are haunted by her, she is a succubus that we would, sometimes, be glad to be rid of. For her creator, the endlessly-fascinating Horacio Ferrer, she is the embodiment of the Buenos Aires experience -- of the waves of immigration that transformed the city, of the development of vibrant life, coupled (necessarily, perhaps) with low-life, poverty, misery, drunkenness, sexual-exploitation and -- above all -- with the art-form, dance and song, of the Tango, and with its subcutaneous, beloved irritant of the sound of the bandoneon.

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