Netherlands Netherlands Violin Competitors [1] – Concerto Finals: Salomé Bonnema, Kira van der Woerd, Enzo Kok (violin), Residentie Orkest / Jonathan Bloxham (conductor). Grote Zaal, Tivoli/Vredenburg, Utrecht, 27.1.2024. (LV)
Mendelssohn – Violin Concerto in E minor
Lalo – Symphonie Espagnole in D minor
On a blustery night time in Utrecht, 22-year-old Salomé Bonnema swept to victory within the Netherlands Violin Competitors with a efficiency of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. She started slowly, earlier than accelerating by means of the rocky octaves to an ideal pace. Her serenely elegant phrasing, by no means distorting time or area, projected brilliantly above the orchestra and flashed with power in any respect the best pivot factors.
She spun a seamless move of music with the long-lasting spiccato arpeggios. Biggest miracle of all, she and the Residentie Orkest beneath Jonathan Bloxham allowed the normally obscured introduction to the sluggish motion to bloom like a flower, the bassoons wailing with beautiful huge vibrato. She performed the Andante sweetly, with an open coronary heart – divine. As soon as launched into the finale, Bonnema performed the excessive harmonic flashes straight on, and did the intricate, insanely quick passagework hand-in-glove with the orchestra. She nailed the good pause earlier than heading into the cadenza the place, after three great clarinet sighs, she ratcheted up the stress with growing selection earlier than hovering above the orchestra for the ultimate chords and rapturous applause.
It’s a measure of how fierce the competitors was that 21-year-old Enzo Kok, who took house the extremely coveted Viewers Prize for his impulsively surging efficiency of the Mendelssohn that led off the night, solely received Third Prize. He had performed with a younger lover’s poetry and keenness – and the type risk-taking that, as within the finale, surrounded by the sounds of cellos, horns and violas, created music of indescribable magnificence.
The award for braveness beneath hearth went to the youngest of the finalists, 18-year-old Kira van der Woerd who, weakened by flu throughout the week, discovered the mandatory enchantments and virtuosity to indicate off Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole in all its seductive glory and win Second Prize.
Whereas the jurors have been making their selections, the stage gave means for a set evoking Paris and Django by Moon Backyard, winners of the Jonge Makers Competitors for violinist-led ensembles in genres apart from classical: jazz, people, Arabic or Indian, city or pop. This dedication to the brand new and younger carried by means of in the primary competitors itself, which required the semi-finalists to create multidisciplinary performances together with visitor musicians and artists.
The night time earlier than the concerto finals, the competitors threw a six-hour-long social gathering known as ‘Night time of the Violin Pageant’ that occurred within the higher halls and efficiency areas of the Tivoli/Vredenburg, throughout which nothing a lot was classical. Improv guru Tim Kliphuis curated a collection of concurrent and overlapping concert events that included Irish and Romanian people music, jazz and rock, improv and silent disco, performed by a line-up that includes Tessa Lark, Baroque grasp Shunske Sato, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra deputy concertmaster Tjeerd Prime, the Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Anna Al-Kadami and Isobel Warmelink.
Extra on ‘Night time of the Violin’ in my subsequent report.
Laurence Vittes
Featured Picture: Salomé Bonnema, Enzo Klok and Kira van der Woerd © Foppe Schut
