(Un)finished Symphony in Miryzaal Gent

Under the title "conservatorium on stage" the symphony orchestra KASK and Conservatorium presented on 24 March Schubert's Unfinished and Luciano Berio's Rendering in the Ghent Miryzaal. Not with their own conductor, but exceptionally with the young American conductor Elias Peter Brown, who has also conducted the Symfonieorkest Vlaanderen. Brown attracted international attention by winning the Korean International Conducting Competition. This was a so-called highlight moment, where students in music, drama and visual arts present their results and performances. The "un" of unfinished appeared in brackets on the programme, because it detracts from the splendour and perfection of the two movements that make up this symphony. Two very contrasting movements, yet entirely Schubert. Modest, restrained, but at times also grand and overwhelming. A friendly Schubertian melody, interspersed with passages of barren stillness. I wonder if another conductor could make them play together so well. Elias Peter Brown is barely a few years older than the students on stage, but you can see and feel how he has command of them, leading them with his baton and gesticulating with the strength and suppleness of a ballet dancer. Apart from a minor intonation flaw in the cellos, we listened to skillful ensemble playing among the strings and beautiful solos from the wind players. Sometimes the brass a bit too loud, here and there too heavy articulation in the trombones, that happens often enough. It doesn't detract from the excellent impression. Luciano Berio wrote his Rendering from 1987 based on another, even more unfinished symphony by Schubert, of which only piano sketches exist from Schubert's last days. It is not a reconstruction like the one made of Mahler's Tenth. Berio orchestrates the motifs and melodies as Schubert would have done, but he leaves the empty spaces empty, to insert a kind of polyphonic meditation in his own style. A challenge for this young orchestra, good that this lesser-known work by an important twentieth-century composer is programmed alongside the all-too-familiar Unfinished by Schubert. The only false note in this concert was the substandard programme you received at the entrance. Nothing wrong with an A4 folded in two, but a proper performance deserves more than this hastily put together sheet in sloppy layout with a few sentences, plucked from Wikipedia.

WHO: Symfonieorkest KASK & Conservatorium conducted by Elias Peter Brown

WHAT: (Un)finished symphony WHERE: MIRY Concertzaal (Gent) WHEN: Friday 24 March