Elgar & Strauss

The Ciutat Auditorium reopened its doors to the Balearic Islands Symphony Orchestra with renovated, comfortable, and elegant seating, harmonious with its history, featuring a young, well-known, and renowned protagonist: Kian Soltani. Renowned, as his curriculum shows, and traveled, having performed on many of the world's best stages. Well-known because this is already the third time he has visited us. First at the Trui, with Dvořák, then at Bellver Castle, with Schumann, and this last time with the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, by Edward Elgar. A work of maturity, although perhaps there is no work by Elgar that does not seem so. There is no doubt that when he wrote it, his state of mind was one of infinite affliction and sorrow; perhaps because of this circumstance, the choice of the cello could not have been more appropriate. Even so, the composition, with which the author bid farewell to symphonic music, had to wait to find the place it currently occupies. A place where the most canonical pieces for the instrument reside. Kian Soltani made this clear with the recitative that begins the composition—tenuous, light, subtle. It continues, in the second movement, with a whole series of repetitions between the soloist and the orchestra, like an exquisite combat, like two ways of expressing the same thing. In the Adagio, the third of the four movements that make up the piece, the spotlight falls on the soloist, who provided an immense display of talent and delicacy on Soltani's part, which he signed off with the initial section. Also the fourth movement, Finale, requires the magnificence of the protagonist, to try to overcome the sorrow, which finally returns to where it has breathed throughout the musical lament. Soltani and the Symphony complemented each other perfectly with a score that demands the absolute conjunction they achieved. A mandatory encore and once again a small composition that claims his Persian origins.

I do not know what relationship there might be between Elgar's concerto and the polyhedral symphonic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss, but, in any case, both are always welcome. The introduction, stratospheric, perhaps that is why Stanley Kubrick made it iconic when he used it almost sixty years ago in his monumental and Babel-like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its origin was not simple either, the philippic of a powerful Nietzsche. The fact is that one and the other have followed different and even divergent paths. A whole series of fugues, counterpoints, and modulations establish an immense corollary, filled with contrasts where we find everything from a waltz to a delicate cello solo, or a demonstration of the importance that the timpani can come to have. All in all, a cathedral-like mosaic, with an introduction and eight diverse epigraphs, without upheavals. A very good first installment.

P.S.- This business about Garci and Arias is a mess.