Christian Reif receives praise for Stavanger Symphony Orchestra performance
Christian Reif leads the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra featuring Julia Bullock on Barber’s Knoxville - Summer of 1915
“Superb”, writes Aftenbladet's reviewer about Thursday's concert with the German conductor Christian Reif and the American soprano Julia Bullock
By Eirik Lodén
Stavanger Aftenblad
November 20, 2020
This was well worth ten quarantine days in Bjergstedparken
The musician couple Julia Bullock and Christian Reif obviously find the tone both on and off the podium: There is no corona distance in their music. Through changing moods, from forbidden infatuation and child guilt to the devilish violence, we got a display of artistic exclusion that was more than just inside - it was superb, extremely clear, both intimate and communicative.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky allegedly emptied the Socratic poison cup in the form of a glass of unboiled water during a cholera epidemic in the late autumn of 1893. If so, was it inadvertent - or planned risky behavior as a kind of passive suicide? We will probably never get the answer, but there are many indications that he was run into a corner just then and a scandal bubble was about to burst, related to his gay love practice. In any case, he was a master at depicting difficult or tragic love, in the great operas, but also in an early work such as the fantasy overture "Romeo and Juliet", which has retained its youthful freshness to this day. At least one of the themes may still be someone humming to himself in the shower, without necessarily realizing that it is Tchaikovsky. In any case, the explosive contrasts and the always classically toured emotionality of these Shakespearean musical charts have not loosened the hair-raising neck grip or released the ability to take gut-wrenching on the audience, roommates in heart chambers and tear ducts. At least when it hits so everything sits, as it did tonight - passionate and raw, but with razor-sharp precision in the details.
Between two towering Russians a detour to America: When Samuel Barber (1910-1981) wrote one of his central works "Knoxville Summer of 1915", he could probably live relatively openly in artistic circles with his male girlfriend, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti - but not without the potential cost of reputation, status, and career as a public figure in the McCarthy-era United States. The lyrical soprano Julia Bullock had hot honey on her vocal cords when she took us to the nostalgic summer of 1915 and "enchanted our eardrums" - to paraphrase James Age's prose poem that Barber has set to music, which reminds us of what it feels like to be a child lying on his back out on a lawn, with all his senses and pores wide open to the world. All this and more, including the literary qualities, Bullock conveyed, in a sensitive and touching song interpretation. Even the most exposed tones in the highest register had an expressive effect, which does not always happen.
Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-75) was not gay, like the two predecessors on tonight's well-composed program. Yet he lived in social conditions that made it inevitable for him to live his true inner life in secret, to relive his productive manhood as a weary, terrorized trapeze artist, with tight line dancing in the Soviet state circus. There were fifteen symphonies in the end, of varying quality and character, but he is a monolith in modern symphonic repertoire, with his double-minded Mona Lisa half-smile behind the tragic-sarcastic mask, like a Kafka modulated to music. He wrote the precocious first symphony as a young wizard with a Harry Potter nerd appearance between the ages of 17 and 19, in the optimistic phase before the circus darkened, before Stalin tightened his reins in the manege and banged his whip behind the scenes. As rival Prokofiev's first, it is an electric explosion of youthful genius, peaceable, impertinent, a compact rolled-up hedgehog of bristly spikes, but with a closet-romantic in his stomach.
It is easy to both see and hear that Christian Reif is passionate about Shostakovich, based on the hypnotic concentration and the infectious energy he shaped it all with. He is simply incredibly good at drawing music gesturally, with a gifted body language, precise signals, without just "directing for the audience". Our orchestra is only getting better and better, it seems, almost from season to season, and Reif was the man to lure out of them both the most perfect harmony and virtuoso solo playing from absolutely all instrument sections.
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