PERFORMANCES of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are not necessarily made or broken by the four soloists in the last movement, although it can be a bit of a let-down if they or the chorus are not very good.
Given the pedigrees of the quartet on duty this Saturday at the opening concert of the 2008-09 Sheffield International Concert Season at the City Hall, plus the fact that the chorus is the Sheffield Philharmonic, it should be a knockout.
An absolu
te kockout, as the orchestra is the BBC Philharmonic and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda who makes a rare trip to Sheffield as the internationally-famed orchestra's chief conductor since 2002.
Concurrently, last year he was appointed music director of one of Italy's most famous opera houses, the Teatro Regio in Turin, so he knows all about vocal music.
Leading Schiller's Ode to Joy off in the last movement, Scottish bass-baritone Iain Paterson made his professional debut with Opera North and is now being hailed on the world's major opera stages.
He shortly debuts in Chicago as Don Giovanni, at the New York Met next year in Götterdämmerung as Gunther and in the same part, plus Fasolt in Das Rheingold, at the Bastille Opera in Paris in 2110.
Keighley-born lyric tenor Paul Nilon, well-known to Opera North followers, has a flourishing international reputation – San Francisco, Bavarian State operas, for example – in music from Monteverdi to Britten, particularly composers from music's Baroque and Classical eras.
The two female soloists, although chiefly involved in an ensemble capacity, can be seen as luxury 'casting' as both Swedish soprano Hillevi Martinpelto and English mezzo soprano Jane Irwin, have wide-ranging global careers, the former especially with hugely impressive repertoire.
Beethoven's symphony is well-known enough not to need further comment, but not many people may know much about the work being performed before it this Saturday, Liszt's Dante Symphony.
A Symphony on Dante's Divine Comedy, as the composer called it when he completed it in 1856, it lasts around 50 minutes and is not really a symphony, rather a couple of long symphonic poems depicting the Inferno (Hell) and Purgatory with a setting of the Magnificat stuck on the end of the latter.
Liszt's future son-in-law Wagner, the work's unofficial dedicatee, persuaded him that it was impossible to depict Paradise in music, hence the Magnificat (My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord) sung by female voices in its place. He later added a noisier ending.
Being Liszt, you know what the expect in the Inferno movement, dramatic granduer and vehemence which eases a little in its central section, the Francesca/ Paolo scene, the source of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini. Purgatory is calmer and more reflective and, perhaps, Wagner was wrong. If anyone was capable of a depiction in music of Paradise, maybe it was Liszt. We will never know.
MORE:
Listings Guide
Arts GuideFilm GuideTheatre and EventsMusic GuideFront RoomThe full article contains 496 words and appears in Sheffield Telegraph newspaper.
