Nestling twixt the giants of the Monaco's social and sporting calendar is a fascinating miniature arts festival, Printemps des Arts. You wouldn't think it so miniature from the hoardings and posters that are plastered around the Principality, but this is a festival during which you could happily attend every event without any onset of performance fatigue. A perfect size, you could say.
Two-thirds of the way into this two-week long, boldly programmed affair the pianist François-Frédéric Guy was well into his performance of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas. In two concerts last Wednesday (9 April) he played Nos 15-21 at the Salle Empire, part of the spectacular Hotel de Paris complex adjacent to the famous Casino. It took a while to get used to Guy's style of playing in Sonatas 16-18. His it not scientific Beethoven, more philosophical - and the unevenness of some of his runs and ostinati were uncomfortable, as was the lunging drama of his interpretation.
In the second of the performances (beginning at 9pm - this is a town which comes alive at night), Guy seemed more settled into his Beethovenian vein. He picked out lines in the textures of the 15th and 20th sonata with a graceful beauty, and his 'sturm und drang' performance manner was more at home with the lyrical, almost operatic feel of the later sonatas, even if his dramatic conceptions occasionally trespassed on the music's sense of line and radiance. And you wouldn't have wanted to be the careless mobile-phone user who found him or herself on the receiving end of Guy's dagger-stare after his Beethovenian tirade was interrupted.
The following night, after aquarium, palace, museum, restaurant and opera house visits (the latter is quite unique and a genuine treat), it was off to the cliff-edge Auditorium Ranier III for a performance from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, a 150-year-old ensemble that says goodbye this year to distinguished maestro Marek Janowski, saying hello to Yakov Kreizberg in his place. But for this concert, the functionally titled 'Portrait Schoenberg', it was Eliahu Inbal who took to the podium.
The Auditorium Ranier III isn't the finest place to witness a concert - think London's Barbican Hall with the ceiling lowered by more than half its height, and you've got something of a picture - and the audience was inexplicably small. Beginning was a new work by Gilbert Amy; an interesting, entertaining and taught piece of post-Schoenbergian orchestral music which despite some special moments didn't quite hang together; harshly judged, a bad piece of good music. In Schoenberg's Violin Concerto the Orchestra played with discipline if not flair, but the talents of soloist Kolja Blacher made up for that. He tamed the beast, giving a warm but prickly performance of this slippery piece and finding new lyricism in many an obsinate corner.
The main-course was mouth-watering even when viewed from the menu: Schoenberg's gloriously luscious and only-just-pre-serialist tone poem Pelleas et Melisande. The murmurings that open the piece were rather clinical, but with encouragement from the rich, Romantic first violins the Orchestra soon got into its tragi-heroic stride, negotiating the sudden lunges, halts and introspections of the piece with genuine passion. As it climbed the peaks of Schoenberg's work, the Orchestra was stifled a little by the auditorium's unforgiving blast, but this was a fine performance nonetheless, which did its best to transcend the confines of an atmosphere-less hall. So if any Monte Carlans out there are wondering what to do with that spare 70-million euros, how about building a new orchestral cocnert hall for the Principality? This innovative festival and orchestra both deserve one.
Andrew Mellor
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