Klaus Mäkelä creates a musical dream with the Concertgebouw Orchestra from which you do not want to wake up

Just over a year ago, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Klaus Mäkelä thrilled the audience with Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ by breaking down the boundary between sound and image. It wasn’t that that world appeared before your mind’s eye, but you still imagined yourself in another dimension for a moment.

The musicians and their future chief conductor (as of 2027) managed to evoke that same magic again on Wednesday evening at a concert in which everything revolved around images. That started with a piece by Hawar Tawfiq from 2021, M.C. Escher’s Imagination, for which the composer was inspired by, among other things, the mysterious work of this graphic artist. The Dutch landscape, the insect world and the large beach animals of the artist Theo Jansen were also on his mind when composing.

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It resulted in a fantasy world where the wind breathes life. In the first short impulses, a nocturnal animal life seems to awaken. An insect trips in the beautiful percussion, a strange bird sings in the solo violin and finally there are the swaying strings, after which the music falls asleep again with a soothing sigh from a wind instrument.

The nighttime atmosphere continued in the Nights in the gardens of Spain by Manuel de Falla, a musical sketch of three gardens in Andalusia, Spain. These are nights – or so it sounds – full of dancing, animated conversations, and a sneaky courtship here and there. Pianist Javier Perianes and the orchestra turned it into an infectious flirt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyoEiRPmq6M

Skipping children

After the break there was that famous musical walk by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky past the paintings of his fellow countryman Victor Hartmann, who died young. Originally written for piano, Maurice Ravel created a masterly and famous orchestration of the Painting exhibition. The eleven musical paintings were largely lost, but the orchestra and Mäkelä evoked such a vivid image that it was as if you had entered the works of art and stood face to face with a crippled gnome, or saw children skipping around you in the Parisian Tuileries Gardens, or by the diffuse light of a lantern, wandered through subterranean vaults, before returning home enthusiastically waved goodbye through ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’.

Mäkelä and the musicians beautifully highlighted Ravel’s brilliant orchestral discoveries (trumpet, saxophone, bassoon, tuba) and turned the walk past the paintings into a dream from which you did not want to wake up.

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