This group is becoming entirely too conductor-centric again, but I think I have a new favorite conductor among the young set - possibly even moreso than Roth or Petrenko....
Over and over again, Juraj Valcuha has come to DC, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and I've ignored his concerts for flashier names. Valcuha's generally slow tempos and austere manner seemed duller than a number of others. How wrong I was....
In musicmaking like this we hear the holistic, humanistic ideal of what music should always be, in which passion, intelligence, precision, and sincerity come together in every note. That is what true music is, when every note by every musician has the right to be heard and every note supports every other note. The first time I heard Mariss Jansons live when I was 14, I experienced that sense of what music could be - even if I didn't have a sense of what it was yet, and in this imperfect world, have sought that ideally deep spiritual experience as often as I can in both my listening and the music I write. With Valcuha, you hear literally everything with both the space to let the details be heard and the structure to show how every detail interrelates to each other. This is perhaps musicmaking at its very deepest level. It causes music to sound as though lit from the beyond. There are other, more purposive, ways of approaching music that connect it more to life, and it is not to neglect the more frenetic ideal of Kirill Petrenko or the gentler ideal of Ivan Fischer, or the virtuosity of Markus Stenz, the dramatic characterization of Manfred Honeck.
But here's the difference with Valcuha: Petrenko and Stenz cause elation. Fischer causes tears. Honeck causes awe.
But the end of this kind of performance is just catharsis, a simple soul purging. It's so inevitable that you don't know why you're drawn in, and yet every measure hypnotizes you deeper and deeper in, as though an ethical force binds and surrounds you. At every minute, you experience the total effect as though the music is gently guiding you from note to note. Live, I've only experienced this sense from two conductors: Mariss Jansons and Christoph von Dohnanyi, and three pianists: Alfred Brendel, Leon Fleisher, and Andras Schiff. On record you can get it from a few more, but they're all gone.
Valcuha has just signed to be the next director of the Houston Symphony. He's replacing Andres Orozco-Estrada, no slouch. But AOE (sorry) is a much more frenetic type. He makes music with virtuoso enthusiasm and lightness. There is nothing light about Valcuha, but nor is there heaviness. There is just... music, and beauty, and compassion, emanating from a place we don't know where.
Here he is in one of my favorite pieces of music. You'd think a performance this straight ahead wouldn't catch the humor and pathos, but you'd be completely wrong. I long to hear the whole thing now. As with Jansons or Klemperer or Erich Kleiber, you will hear that musical equanimity of purpose, in which every note has context, every chord has essence, and every musical moment tolls like a church bell.
You had better believe I will try to be down in Houston once a year. This... is... MUSIC!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym2QvHQNyPU
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