Pollença and the OSIB

PalmaContinue the tradition. This year's Pollença Festival, more orchestral than ever, has once again incorporated the presence of the Balearic Islands Symphony Orchestra in its programming. It is the golden finale to an always dense season, like a well-deserved gift of prestige. The occasion featured the direction of Patrick Hahn and the cellist Alban Gerhardt as soloist performing the Cello Concerto in E minor Op. 85 by Edward Elgar. A work of maturity, his last orchestral piece, like a testament, that of an old and sick man who is figuring out the end of his existence and wants to explain his state with this intense and painful groan. Not a sprout of enthusiasm from the initial lament of the solo instrument, which does nothing but foreshadow and confirm all that will come next, when the violas accompany him on this first, somber, and deep stroll. A moderately slow. Alban Gerhardt, the great protagonist, managed to bring out the immense melodic richness of the composition from his instrument, with a very introspective reading that, in some way, brought fidelity to the spirit of the original. Patrick Hahn, the young Austrian conductor, on the one hand, and the Symphony, on the other, offered the essential balance and circumspection to achieve the ideal equilibrium of a score that concentrates beauty and sadness in equal measure. With a Prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach, Alban Gerhardt acted as if he had finished his performance.It was not so. A detail that honors him, and it is not minor. Significant. Alban Gerhardt joined the orchestra to perform the piece that crowned the function, the luminous Scheherazade op. 35 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, based on some of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights, which the protagonist who gives her name to the composition told Sultan Shahriar to appease his anger. But this is another story. The composition is a whole array of delicacies with which some of the instruments showcase their best virtues. Thus, Spahiu, Bleuse, Miralles, Arnal, and Fortea —violin, cello, flute, and oboe— displayed many of their skills in a small, great marvel that, being so colorful, never ceases to shine, as happened in this second concert of the Pollença Festival. A second concert that began with a Prelude from Tristan and Isolde, which, in a way, suffered from the malady of references, but which in any case served as a good prologue to the British composer's piece. A German, a British, and a Russian... offered us another good concert of the level and prestige of the event that occupies and will occupy us throughout the month of August.