Violin Concerto No. 1 (1999)

The nearest we got to high voltage was in the music of Järvi’s friend and compatriot Tüür, whose Violin Concerto was the real blood-curdling meat of this concert, performed by the powerful Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen. 

Like an athlete, she ran headlong into the theme dominating this intriguing work: a long series of razor-sharp and lightning-quick arpeggios that soon infested the whole of the string section, as soloist and orchestra were thrown into a duel across a battlefield of musical styles. Here were brutally dissonant cluster chords, violent bangs, crashes, slips and slides (think Tom and Jerry); there, the tintinnabulations and wide, still landscapes of that other big Estonian, Arvo Pärt; and now, pestering minimalist mosquitoes, and, even more shockingly, warm moments of trilling, sweet melody. 

The sheer power, scope and energy of this music, whether suppressed and circling madly round itself in insane woodwind passages, or released through huge shudders of brass, percussion and strings, was a sound and sight to behold – the orchestra, though upstaged by the CBSO in a new CD of the work, did a fine job here at least. And van Keulen, still reeling off the arpeggios to the end, was cheered home like a marathon winner. 

Forget the hoopla about thematic programming and anniversaries. It's new music that keeps the Proms fresh, as the  BBC Philharmonic's two weekend concerts demonstrated. 

First, under Paavo Järvi, it gave the London premiere of the Violin Concerto by Järvi's fellow Estonian, Erkki-Sven Tüür. The soloist, Isabelle van Keulen, has played the piece a dozen times since premiering it in 1999, and her interpretation has manifest authority. She opens with mechanistic sawing, but before this rudimentary gesture coalesces into a full-blown theme, woodwinds snatch it from her, transform it and pass it around the orchestra. The soloist again tries to assert herself; this time, high strings steal her thunder. And so it continued. This simple but effective drama easily sustains a long first movement that eventually reaches a furious climax, dominated by drumming that wouldn't be out of place in a rock band. The music subsides into exhausted silence, then low strings shudder back into life. 

The soloist expands this tiny charge of energy into the lyrical ecstasy for which the first movement had striven, eventually leading the orchestra to a moment of calm that feels like closure; but Tüür adds a brief coda, a frenzied  knees-up, which, with satisfying symmetry, returns us to the concerto's opening gesture. [...]

Think of any major violin concerto and you are likely to remember above all its lyricism. Most composers leave the combative side of the medium to their piano works. But the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur has unusually brought the original concept of the concerto as a kind of musical duel between soloist and orchestra to bear in his Violin Concerto, first performed in 1999.

On the face of it, it could have been something of a hotchpotch. Any composer who professes to commune with both minimalism and modernism and creates a single language from their contradictory demands would seem to have given himself something of an impossible task. But there is a highly successful synthesis of these opposing musics to be heard in the work, which received its London premiere at Friday night's Prom by the soloist for whom it was written, the Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen. In the fighting-fit first movement, minimalist repetition of rhythm, figuration and harmonies are played off against chord clusters and violent, disjunct stabbings; in this case, it is the orchestra that wins, despite the soloist's welter of arpeggios, recalling Schnittke at his most obsessive. But, although there are moments of lyricism, heard in the interlocking string lines with their traces of Arvo Part's Fratres, this is a convincing vindication of a composer playing against the medium's type. The central movement, rising from the orchestral depths and heading for the stars, sees the violin gaining the upper hand and, in the short finale, soloist and orchestra are reconciled in playful rivalry. Van Keulen, whose recording of the work has just been released by ECM Records, was a commanding soloist, unfazed by all the composer hurls at her, both in her own part and the constant bombardment of shattered-glass ideas coming from the orchestra, which in this case was the BBC Philharmonic conducted by fellow Estonian Paavo Jarvi. [...]

Royal Albert Hall, London. BBC Proms. Isabelle van Keulen. BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. Paavo Järvi. August 1, 2003.

At Friday's Prom, the Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi led the BBC Philharmonic in his compatriot Erkki-Sven Tüür's remarkable Violin Concerto. It is a hefty piece, more than half an hour long, but the redoubtable Dutch soloist Isabelle van Keulen, who premiered it in 1999, looked serenely poised throughout its strenuous byways.

Not only the violin part, which begins with frantic sawing of arpeggios, but the whole score sounds athletic and muscularly confident. There's little conventional "development"; rather, in the lengthy first movement, the soloist continually flings out musical ideas which the orchestra seizes upon and alters, feeding them back to her transformed. The second begins in microtonal bass gloom, soon lifted by lyrical flights from the violin, high and bright; the brief final movement unites soloist and orchestra in a race home. It was an afterthought, apparently, and sounds like filling a prescription, without any new ideas. But the whole piece is very striking, and often exciting. Too much has been made, I think, of Tuur's "synthesising" oftonality and atonality, minimalism, serialism and what-have-you; this is simply a composer with his own generous idiom, happy to borrow effects and devices from many sources. He began as a rock musician, and traces of that often surface in his music. [...]

I confess to venturing to the CBSO's UK premiere of Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür's Violin Concerto with some trepidation, dreading the bland, the tonal, the self-congratulatory. How wrong I was.

Tüur, now in his early forties and largely self-taught, is no wafting tunester. A contemporary of James MacMillan, he too evolved from a rock background and clings, even more firmly than MacMillan, to the forceful modernism of Lutoslawski (and others) that initially fired him; unlike the Pärt/Gorecki generation, he sees no cause to eschew it. 

Thus, Tüür's Violin Concerto, receiving its UK premiere from Dutch Menuhin prizewinner Isabelle van Keulen – a gripping performer, who attacks Tüür's rasping, spunky arpeggios like a hungry Rottweiler – made a powerful impact. The conductor Paavo Järvi, whose slightly dour bandmaster manner secured excellent ensemble and went on to explore new depths, was backed by the CBSO's nowadays superb, Berlin-like strings in Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, which was as sneered at in 1945 as Vaughan Williams's Third was after the Great War.

Tüür likes a big orchestra and big noise. Initially, one wondered whether some parings-down might better engender the contrasts he seeks. (There are few such moments, though in the central movement – ushered in by thick, multi-divided double basses alternating with slivers of bowed cymbal, a cluck of bass clarinet and jangle of bell – the solo line emerges like some gorgeous Aphrodite from the wispy foam, at one point with almost Bergian transcendence.)

But astonishingly, the thick textures and endless internal activity seems to add up; most striking was the way Van Keulen's solo line cut through thick hedges of bristling, often contradicting, same-register strings. I never thought I'd hear myself use the word feisty, but here both soloist and piece felt feisty. Punchy, aggressive double-stopping was stunned by a sudden diminuendo, and there she was, hovering, as if over a translucent ground-mist of string harmonics. Magical.

There was plenty more in this anything-but-bland score, from the brush of percussion and the murmur of clarinet and marimba over which she bursts in like a manic Hardanger folk-fiddle player; the acidic blasts of xylophone-nudged brass; a double-bass fade-out as nerve-racking as a disappearing Tube train; big block chordings; a wealth of pierrot-like flute patter and low-lapping strings. Tüür's vivid cadenza, over a clip-clopping wood block accompaniment, neatly heralded the Shostakovich, the clear hero of which was the CBSO's bassoon soloist, Andrew Barnell. 

Symphony Hall, Birmingham. Isabelle van Keulen. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Paavo Järvi. May 28, 2002.

The Baltic states seem to be overflowing with composers these days. It was Arvo Part who first established a presence on the international stage, and the younger generations have followed in his wake over the past 10 years, with music that revels in the artistic freedom that has come hand-in-hand with political independence. In a broader European context not all these composers are either interesting or original figures, but the Estonian Erkki-Sven Tuur, born in 1959, does stand out. Performances of his works in this country are still rare, but the British premieres of two of his recent scores formed the centrepiece of the CBSO's programme on Tuesday, when they were conducted by Tuur's compatriot Paavo Jarvi. 

There's a bit of everything in Tuur's music. Serial techniques meld with diatonic harmony, minimalism rubs shoulders with Part's tintinnabulations and the controlled aleatoricism of Lutoslawski. But the way in which these disparate elements are integrated is always impressive and distinctive. The Violin Concerto, first performed in Frankfurt in 1999 by Isabelle van Keulen, who was also the thrillingly assured soloist here, shows Tuur taking on a traditional three-movement form and making something personal out of it. In the opening movement the solo violin exchanges ideas with the orchestra – arpeggios are imitated by the orchestral strings and trigger rippling scales in the woodwind; solo pizzicatos are echoed by pulsing percussion; spiky violin lines interact with dense chords. Relationships constantly change, though the movement does slightly run out of steam just before it merges with the slow movement, where the violin rhapsodises over much more static orchestral material. 

The second and third movements of the concerto do not quite sustain the level of the first but the ideas are always sharply focused and their impact carefully calculated. That's true of Tuur's concert opener, Aditus, as well, starting off with brass and bells and then offering a survey of all his basic musical techniques. It is certainly effective, and sounded spectacular in Symphony Hall.

Paavo Järvi's program Thursday night at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra explored two opposite poles. But the energy created by pairing the avant-garde Violin Concerto by Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür with Beethoven's Symphony No. 4 resulted in a buzz after the concert such as has not been heard here in years.
Mr. Järvi's compatriot, Mr. Tüür, has eclectic musical roots that began with his 70s rock band. His Violin Concerto, given its U.S. premiere by Isabelle van Keulen on Thursday, is a work of expressive power and originality that pitted tonal against atonal, ddelicate against massive and simple rhythms against complex.
Ms. van Keulen, 34, who will record the concerto with Maestro Järvi and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, was in absolute command of the work's brilliant figurations. Her supercharged ostinatos in the outer movements – a nod to minimalism – were a perpetual motion of fire and tension. She projected a cool intensity in the slow movement, which began with low, primeval sounds in the orchestra. The finale had enormous rhythmic energy, aided by a counterpoint of percussion.
The orchestra was an admirable partner, taking its impulse from the soloist and going in diverse directions, which included a spectacular jazzy climax in the first movement. Urgent and bright, the concerto held the audience's attention and inspired a standing ovation. The composer took a bow. [...]

Music Hall, Cincinnati. Isabelle van Keulen. Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Paavo Järvi. Nov. 15. 2001.

How do you attract Beauty (young people) to the Beast's castle (the symphony)? Sweeten the concert with food, drink and a party, all for $10. Music director Paavo Jarvi and the Cincinnati Symphony did that and more Thursday night at Music Hall. The ''more'' was new music, Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur's Violin Concerto in its U.S. premiere. The ''that'' was a complimentary buffet before the concert. Student tickets were only $10 and University of Cincinnati students were invited to a special post-concert ''Party with Paavo'' in Corbett Tower featuring food, cash bar and acoustic rock by Kevin Fox and Steve Waak (aka ''Cree py Eye'').

Works like Tuur's – and it has company among a growing body of music being written today – is what may finally lower the average age (mid-50s) of the current concert audience. The work shared the program with Carl Orff's 1914 ''Tanzende Faune'' (''Dancing Fauns''), also a U.S. premiere, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 4.

Tuur's 1998 work, superbly performed by Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen, proved itself a powerful attraction, for Tuur, 42, has a sonic and structural imagination of the first order. The classically trained composer, who began his career writing and performing for a progressive rock band, sees his Violin Concerto as a progressive dialogue between soloist and orchestra. The scoring is vibrant, with myriad percussion, including drum set, vibraphone, glockenspiel, tubular bells, marimba, xylophone and cymbals brushed with a bow (to produce a zinging sound). The violin asserts itself vigorously in the first movement – rapid arpeggios, pizzicato, staccato figures –only to be ''mimicked'' by the orchestra, which at one point overcomes her in sheer density of sound. As if chastened, the violin turns briefly lyrical, but the interaction begins anew. The brief cadenza, punctuated by temple blocks, suggests exercises (practicing?).

The second movement emerges in stillness with bass rumblings and vibrato-less violin. There is a big climax, after which the orchestra seems to make peace with the soloist, and the movement ends ethereally.

The joyful finale is all jazzy perpetual motion, the violin ''catching her breath'' on an open G before the final flurry.

Audience response was warm, with bows for Tuur and a standing ovation for all. [...]