Written by Gábor Tóth
Rossini – The Barber of Seville – Overture
Chopin – Piano Concerto in E minor
– pause –
Prokofiev – Symphony No. 7
Venue (and performers): Oradea Philharmonic
Date: April 3, 2025, 7 p.m.
Statistics: about half the houses, unfortunately.
Conductor: Noam Zur (born in Israel in 1981, I looked at his professional biography: Argentina, Dubrovnik, Frankfurt, so there's no doubt, he's a conductor who has seen and traveled the world)
Pianist soloist: Isabella Voropciuc (b. 2002, Szatmárnémeti, currently in her final year at the Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, I read it in the program booklet afterwards, but I hear much earlier in her playing that she is a student of Boldizsár Csíky, more on that later…)
My first thought was, “putting together a show like this”… Then I somehow liked the rainbow-colored idea of variety, like poppy seed lecsó, you know, when you accidentally turn two pages in the cookbook while cooking. But I’m not complaining… I was there as an MV, not like some people (in theater slang: “as an accident”), but “as a guest” – a good friend got a ticket again.
Rossini Overture: beyond "symphonic" music, it has now truly become a stage overture. Two comments: the wind instruments were not sufficiently polished, and the typical end-boosting that Rossini does so well was crude here, and to reiterate, I feel the orchestra did not feel it. By the way, the orchestra praised this conductor a lot, both beforehand, during rehearsals and afterwards, but beyond the technique, he didn't say much to me, but he brought out what he could from the current young team, that's a fact.
Chopin, Piano Concerto in E minor. I'm not discussing whether it's second or first, smart people have already figured that out for me. I don't understand why there were four double basses here, when in other times, for works of greater caliber from the point of view of sound, three were enough - the Philharmonic will know this for itself, it will distribute it...
I'll tell you more about my current musical experiences with the soloist. Isabella Voropciuc, in her, in addition to her excellent technique, I also felt the emotional fire that Chopin, at the time when he stepped outside the salon gloves and devoted himself to writing piano concertos, could only find in Beethoven in this genre.
Precision, ink, memory, taste, dynamics, passion, intellect, conscience, maximalism, Chopin's balance between lyricism and exaltation in stylistic knowledge, a razor-sharp virtuoso third movement, with an almost scarlet-like glittering ink. These are the things I thought I heard from Isabella now. Perhaps only the agogics of the second movement (it is very difficult to time this well with an orchestra) was a bit pre-made, but then we are talking about a final-year music academy student, please, I shouldn't even say such things, we have to collaborate here, briefly and in the deep end, there is no time for stories. So, about all the above positives, this is what is so typical of Isabella's teacher at the Cluj-Napoca Academy of Music, pianist Boldizsár Csíky, and what he is able to pass on to his students – Boldi does not let just any pianists from his hands enter the artistic career, and all his students, whom I have known and heard, receive the best foundations from him to start their career. Anyway, it is a personal experience, feel free to listen to the evergreen starting note relationship starting with "Long is the day..." after the long piano entrance in Chopin's E minor, a very nice anachronism...
Second part of the concert… I felt so much a lack of the Prokofiev symphony that I don’t know why the “fresh” Várad had to start with the Seventh right away, it would have been nice for the local audience to hear the previous six now, before the musicians embark on such a big job. (Of course, the First, the hit, has been performed here many times over the years). Prokofiev’s dark lights were nicely outlined in the unspeakables spoken between the lines, which the great Soviet Union, embracing half of Europe, made impossible for those who wanted to say them, to the misfortune of those who wanted to say them. Returning to the orchestral sound, I heard falsehoods again in the strings, but I’m used to it. I felt that this orchestra still needs to work on Prokofiev’s Seventh a little more. Three or four days of rehearsal time is not enough. The orchestra came to its senses about halfway through the first movement. It occurred to me that perhaps musicians should follow the example of the Sherpas, who are chased by well-paid climbers, who stop every now and then for no reason, just to have time to catch their breath. It's true, Prokofiev was a great composer... 190 cm. tall approx. You can grow up to him, though, over time - and with more careful program planning, of course.
It was about half a house, as I said, but the best joke was that the audience didn't understand at the end of the Prokofiev symphony that this was the end – there was silence for about 20 seconds, but not the kind of silence you get when you fall asleep at the end of the Mozart Requiem, floating on empty fifths, for example, but the disturbing kind, that incomprehensible, stupid silence… It's lucky that the orchestra knew where it was going to end, at least they had it written down in the stims that the final bar line was there.
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