Female Beethoven
Fortunately, more and more female composers have been discovered and rediscovered in recent decades. Well-known examples are Clara Schumann or the sisters Lilly and Nadia Boulanger, but there are many more.
Emilie Mayer was an important female composer from the early Romantic period, strongly influenced by the First Viennese School. She is sometimes called the female Beethoven.
Conductor Richard Egarr is a true Brit. You can see it even before he says a word. He comes on stage with English flair and by no means conducts statically from his place behind the score; he turns and steps toward the various instrument groups.
At the end of the overture I hear an accent from the trombones. Unusual; it must have been a joke by the trombonists. It is always a good sign for the mental health of an orchestra when an instrument group plays a prank on the conductor, the audience or the other musicians.
Laureate
Violinist Tobias Feldmann has been someone I've followed ever since he dazzled in the 2015 Queen Elisabeth Competition with Bartók's second violin concerto. He is one of the handful of laureates from recent decades who has stayed with me. I have also had the chance to hear him live during a recital with Arte Amanti.
Schumann's violin concerto is not an obvious choice for either soloist or concert programmer. In the past it was rarely performed; it had the reputation of being the work of a mentally ill composer. Fortunately, Yehudi Menuhin already championed it in America in the 1950s. Apart from Henryk Szeryng or Gidon Kremer, few star violinists have recorded the concerto. Today the new generation, such as Patricia Kopatchinskaya or Vilde Frang, takes it on.
In spirit and virtuosity it remains an outsider. Joseph Joachim, for whom the work was composed in 1853, did not want to play it. He found the music morbid, a foreshadowing of Schumann's suicide attempt a few months later. Only in the 1930s, eighty years after its composition, was it rediscovered. I myself have always been drawn to it; it has never let me go since I chose it for my First Prize violin exam at the Brussels Conservatory in 1985.
Hope and melancholy
Tobias Feldmann is a splendid violinist and a person of integrity; he always plays very expressively. Precisely this may be the stumbling block with Schumann. "Stumbling block" is a strong expression, but I feel he plays Schumann a little too dramatically, too pathetically. That is fine for much Romantic and modern repertoire, but here Feldmann misses some of the sobriety and melancholy of this piece.
This violin concerto is very Schumannesque in that it expresses hope while always containing a trace of melancholy, of loss. There is a glimmer of hope, but we know that it will soon be over; fate lurks around the corner. Schumann was, incidentally, very satisfied with the piece, even though he was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
After the interval follows Mozart's Prague Symphony, his thirty-eighth.
Mozart in Prague is the best Mozart. He could turn his back on the aristocratic Vienna of the noble salons. In Prague he found a bourgeois audience that admired him, far from the snobs at the Viennese court. A symphony without clarinets, but with an all the greater role for the bassoons. Sometimes they remained a bit in the background, compared with the blaring horns. But that may have been due to where I was sitting.
Conductor Richard Egarr does not conduct statically from behind his desk; he sometimes moves around a bit. This is even more noticeable than in Emilie Mayer's overture. He turns to the front-row players around him like a toreador challenging the bull.
Proms
After the first movement of the Mozart, Richard Egarr turns his head to the audience and makes a hand-clapping gesture. He seems to be suggesting that we should not clap. It is not customary between movements, but at his cue there is nevertheless applause after that first movement. Why not? Before starting the slow second movement he turns to the audience again. We may do anything, he says: clap, talk, throw things. Just as in Mozart's time!
"Mozart would find it horrible": sitting so quietly, listening without applauding after each movement. That is true. In the eighteenth century there was no listening attitude like today's at all. That only arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. Previously, audiences in concerts and operas talked, ate, played cards. A bit like a summer festival such as Rock Werchter today, a musical picnic. The lights stayed on and only went out when conductors in the nineteenth century argued for more seriousness in listening to serious music.
Indeed, Mozart would have found the seriousness of today's listening ethos strange. But after all, we now live in the twenty-first century.
"Go ahead and applaud, shout, throw things, as much as you like!" With that, conductor Richard Egarr gave the audience a bit of historical awareness. That deserves all due credit. And so today was also a bit of a Proms in the Elisabeth Hall in Antwerp!