Switzerland Gstaad Menuhin Festival – ‘Trans-Classics’: Nemanja Radulović and Double Sens. Kirche Saanen, Gstaad, 15.7.2024. (LV)
Beethoven – Violin Sonata in A major, Op.47, ‘Kreutzer’ (arr. Nemanja Radulović for violin and strings)
Rimsky-Korsakov – Scheherazade (arr. Alexander Sedlar for violin, piano and strings)
Classical music is increasingly turning to new approaches for making its works accessible and exciting to wider audiences, particularly those in the highly desirable 18 to 35 age group. The charismatic Serbian virtuoso Nemanja Radulović and the Double Sens ensemble he founded in 2008 made a dramatic impact on a full house here by blending beloved classical traditions with passionate, occasionally outrageous, contemporary sensibilities. In the liner notes to a recording of his arrangement of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, Radulović wrote, ‘While remaining faithful to Beethoven, I allowed myself to exercise my imagination’. On Monday night at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival, he did just that – and with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade too.
The ‘Kreutzer’ started out with the music’s brilliant opening solo violin flourishes to a deceptively sweet accompaniment, followed by a brilliant cello flourish after which Radulović shifted into high gear with the cellos and basses adding massive weight in what might be fairly called an industrial remix for the Beethoven gods. Donald Tovey described Beethoven’s Violin Concerto as gigantic, but it could not compare in size to what we heard Monday which placed the Kreutzer somewhere between the Ninth Symphony and the Grosse Fuge.
The intensity throughout was relentless, with brilliant solos from the concertmaster (sporting a topknot like Radulović), but there were occasional moments, like one of the slow movement variations with a solo quartet, that showed Radulović’s real musicianship. The last movement was definitely Presto with the light-hearted feel of a gig at times but, as in the first movement, there were long stretches when he and the ensemble redefined heavy-handed. The sonata was winding up when a terrific thunderclap rocked the church and torrents of rain began to fall. The violins scrambled briefly before Radulović milked the last drops of sentiment out of the final bars, at which point the supposedly staid Swiss audience responded with their own rain of shouts and applause.
For those like me who are partial to this kind of risk-taking, the recording of Australian violinist Richard Tognetti’s arrangement with Antje Weithaas and Camerata Bern offers a different take. It has a clarity of thought and breathtaking delicacy in the most surprising spots, as in the last movement when the backing strings provide an extraordinary sparkling effect reminiscent of the stars in a planetarium. On the other hand, sixty years ago in Paris while I was discussing the merits with Étienne Ploix, the proprietor of an iconic music store on Rue Placide, of Manuel Rosenthal’s arrangements of Offenbach tunes into the popular ballet Gaîté Parisienne, the elfin M. Ploix smiled gently as he commented that ‘it was not an arrangement. It was a dérangement’.
Whereas the Kreutzer kept to its original forty minutes, Aleksandar Sedlar’s arrangement for violin, strings and piano of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was an entirely different matter, shedding twenty minutes from the orchestral version. While Radulović, the solo cellist and concertmaster were doing their rhapsodically dramatic things, there were savage outbursts from the strings. In the third movement, lights flashing through the church’s windows with thunder in the distance lent a nice romantic touch to the Prince and Princess. Radulović played the little details with exquisite intimacy, threw off double stops with exuberant glee, occasionally launched into a surrealistic clog dance accented by his clunky platform shoes stomping on the stage and engaged in a duet with a whistling second violin. At the end, exhausted perhaps for the moment by all the musical and physical calisthenics, the music just wound up.
Energized by the audience response, even more ferocious than for the Beethoven, Radulović played twenty minutes of encores from his Roots CD, starting off with the ‘Méditation’ from Thaïs and including a little sad-happy musette called ‘Indifférence’, Jonce Hristovski’s ‘Macedonian Girl’ and a surprisingly restrained ‘Csardas’ by Vittorio Monti.
Overall, as one of my workshop students in Maribor wrote fifteen years ago about a program (coincidentally designed by Richard Tognetti) that was reaching out to new audiences – including two cellists playing on one cello, a naked soprano singing Handel and Mario Formenti’s first-ever performance of John Cage’s notorious ‘4′ 33″’ – ‘I wouldn’t like to hear it again, but this one time it was awesome’.
Laurence Vittes