Visionary Sounds : Zimmermann & Van Zweden

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) are very different composers. They are alike only in that neither can be classified as West European: Sibelius is a Finn and Prokofiev is Russian and that both wrote "serious" 20th century orchestral music. Yet we encountered both of them in a single night under Van Zweden.

Sibelius loves the countryside of his native Finland, its bleak,bare and austere mountains, populated by little more than tall firs and pines rising against its dark rocks and the rugged silhouettes of its craggy hills, steep precipices plunging abruptly into the freezing waters of its fjords, the huge waves crashing upon its rocky shores, the thick cover of snow upon the roofs and roads and tree tops, the arrival and departure of its seasonal birds, the explosion of wild flowers in its brief summers, the vast expanses of its grey skies in its long winters, often ravaged by unpredictable blizzards and snow storms amidst spine chilling gusts and the heroic struggles of its people to survive and thrive under such harsh conditions. Often we get glimpses of such in his music, even in his Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op 47 where the violin strives to express the feeling of that grim persistence of the Finnish soul in its heroic efforts to transcend its environment. I don't know why. Our guest solo violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann somehow failed to fully express that kind of quiet, heroic struggle lurking beneath the surface through the bowing upon the violin strings which I feel should be there, thus turning the violin concerto into a rather bland and almost tensionless piece of music. I came with a great deal of expectation. I came away a bit disappointed. Is it time lag or other factors affecting the artist?

The only other piece of music that Saturday night was Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 in B flat Opus 100. This was another piece of music intended by the composer to express the glory of the "free and happy Man". It's a "hymn to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit" and in that sense rather like Sibelius' music but in this case, the forces that Russian spirit had to contend with was no longer the forces of nature but the military might of the Germans during the closing stages of WWII in 1944, when the Russians were fighting hard against Hitler's armies in East Europe and also their motherland The symphony is supposed to portray the struggling human spirit in the first movement, the horrors of war in the second movement,the tragic victory of Russia paid in the currency of untold human suffering and deaths in the third movement and then the sudden change of mood in the fourth movement when the music finally burst into joy, punctuated by memories of the horrors it just underwent. It was magnificently played. Just Van Zweden's type of music!