First, the orchestra accompanied the Paris-born Chinese pianist Bruce Liu, currently resident in Montreal, in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37. (His Chinese first name is not Bruce, by the way, but Xiaoyu – which can mean ‘light rain’, ‘dawn rain’ or ‘little jade’, depending on the characters used.) The orchestra’s quality was apparent from the outset, especially in the perfectly co-ordinated woodwind entries. The soloist, meanwhile, impressed with his sensitivity in the first movement (it was not for nothing that he was declared the winner of the 18th International Chopin Competition in 2021), though I thought his attitude could have been a tad more forthright – especially in the cadenza, which was played with a softness I do not usually associate with Beethoven. (On second thoughts, though, maybe it was the Atatürk Cultural Centre’s dodgy acoustics that damped him down.)

That same sensitivity stood him in good stead in the slow second movement, however: here, he achieved just the right balance between delicacy and solemnity. The orchestra, meanwhile, demonstrated its ability to provide mousey-quiet accompaniment while co-ordinating seamlessly with the soloist. The third movement was agreeably energetic and upbeat, and we heard some nice fanfares from the horns. This time, the pianist gave the cadenza a good deal more oomph, and I was pleased to see him abandon his former reticence. Here is a 19-year-old Bruce Liu giving a confident performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 during the Sendai Competition in Japan. 

After the interval, the orchestra played Schubert’s four-movement Symphony No 9 in C major, D 944, sometimes described as ‘the Great’. This is the last symphony the composer completed before his death in 1828. Robert Schumann, who visited Vienna in 1838, discovered it in a pile of manuscripts shown to him by Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, and took a copy back with him to Leipzig, where it was finally given its first performance by the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. However, owing to its lengthy parts for the woodwinds and strings, the symphony was found to be difficult to play, and when Mendelssohn took it to Paris in 1842 and to London in 1844, orchestras flatly refused to play it. In fact, it took until the early years of the 20th century for the work to become part of the standard repertory. 

In this long and not a little taxing symphony, the second movement, in particular, is somewhat over-generous in the duration department; to my shame, I had to pinch myself repeatedly to stay awake. That is not to say, of course, that the orchestra was anything but magnificent: they negotiated the technical challenges – such as the accelerandi (i.e., gradual speedings-up) and the abrupt changes of tempo – with perfect aplomb. Meanwhile, the conductor maintained the music’s forward momentum with a commendable display of athleticism on the podium. In the following rendition of Schubert’s Symphony No 9, we hear the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

The encore, a piece for pizzicato strings, was a textbook example of perfect co-ordination in an area traditionally regarded as dangerous, and for good reason: one mistimed pluck, and the effect is ruined. How long will it be, I wondered, before Turkish orchestras are able to bring off a feat of this nature? Fortunately, given the way things are going, I can confidently predict that it won’t be all that long. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, our reeds resonant, our mouthpieces moist and our bows bobbing busily up and down until then.

I was wrong.

I discovered that in a neighborhood movie theatre in Istanbul.

A few days after Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey premiered, I went to a Sunday morning screening. I chose the first showing because I've never liked crowds. It was not even an IMAX theater. I remember that detail because it now seems strangely important. I wasn't there for the spectacle. I simply wanted to see how one storyteller had approached another.

The cinema was cool, dark, and almost empty. There couldn't have been more than a dozen people. As the lights faded, I found myself slipping into a familiar habit. I quietly whispered the names of the characters as they appeared on the screen.

Telemachus.

Penelope.

The suitors.

I wasn't trying to impress anyone. If anything, I was reassuring myself that I still knew this world.

Then, without warning, I began to cry.

Not because of one particular scene. Not because of one line. The tears came quietly and stayed with me through almost the entire film.

Even now, I cannot point to the exact moment when they began.

The obvious explanation is that only a few days earlier I had experienced a painful loss. Not in death, but in life. I had lost someone I deeply loved. Of course that mattered.

But I don't think it tells the whole story.

For more than 30 years, I have been a guide in Turkey. I've quoted Homer beneath the walls of Troy, spoken of Odysseus while crossing the Dardanelles, and watched travelers discover these poems for the first time. Somewhere along the way, Homer's stories became part of my own vocabulary. I thought I understood why they had endured for nearly 3,000 years.

I grew up in İzmir, the city that still remembers its older name, Smyrna. Whether Homer was born there or not hardly matters anymore. As a child, I had no idea that I would spend my life telling his stories. Looking back now, it almost feels as though they had been waiting for me.

That Sunday morning, however, something changed.

For the first time, I wasn't telling Homer's story.

He was quietly telling me mine.

In the days that followed, I kept returning to the same question.

Why had I cried?

The recent loss was part of the answer, but only part.

There were older losses too. The death of my father. Relationships that had changed me. Friendships that had quietly slipped away. Regrets that still visit from time to time.

None of those memories appeared on the screen.

Yet somehow they were all there.

Perhaps that is what great stories do.

They don't tell us what to feel.

They recognise feelings we have carried for years without fully understanding them.

When I first read Homer, I admired the adventure.

This time, I recognised the longing.

I recognised the impossibility of returning to the life we once knew.

I recognised the quiet hope that something lost might still be waiting for us.

When I left that little cinema, I found myself thinking about Christopher Nolan's film. Not because it had modernised Homer, but because it had reminded me how astonishingly modern Homer already was. Long before cinema, he understood flashbacks, delayed recognition, shifting perspectives, and the rhythm of a story that reveals itself slowly. More importantly, he understood people.

For years, I believed I had been introducing travellers to Homer.

That Sunday morning, I realised Homer had patiently been waiting to introduce himself to me.

The poem had not changed.

I had.

Yiğit Tahtalıoğlu

The first item on the programme was Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis (1897), a set of three songs for mezzo-soprano and piano. These are settings of prose poems, written in the manner of Sappho, from a collection published by Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925). The author claimed they had been discovered on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, having been penned by Bilitis, a courtesan who was a contemporary of Sappho, and the forgery was so successful that even some experts were taken in.

Feride Büyükdenktaş proved to have a fine, powerful voice; however, it was only in ‘La chevelure’ (‘The Mass of Hair’), the second item in the set, that she truly came into her own. This song is actually about an orgasm (no surprise there – Louÿs was writing erotic poetry even on his deathbed), but although I acknowledge the fact that this was the first item on the programme and the singer had yet to warm up, I thought the process of building up to the climax could have been a tad more unbuttoned. ‘Le tombeau des Naïades’ (‘The Tomb of the Naiads’), the last of the three songs, has some exquisitely lush piano chords, especially in the bars following 1:29 in the recording below. Here, I greatly enjoyed the atmosphere the performers created, and of course the ending – one of my all-time favourites. The following rendition of the Chansons de Bilitis is by the celebrated French soprano Régine Crespin (1927-2007) and the distinguished American accompanist John Wustman, who died in April this year. For some reason they perform the last song first, but I am so entranced by this singer’s voice that I don’t mind.

Saskia Giorgini then played three pieces by the highly prolific French lady composer Mélanie (‘Mel’) Bonis (1858-1938). The three we heard were ‘Desdémona’, ‘Mélisande’ and ‘Ophélie’, from her cycle Femmes de légende (‘Women of Legend’). The pianist’s arpeggios were even and well-controlled, and ‘Mélisande’ – the most harmonically interesting of the three – was played with all the fragile sensitivity the piece demands. In this recording, we hear the whole cycle played by Anna Shelest.

Next, Feride Büyükdenktaş and Saskia Giorgini gave us three songs by Robert Schumann’s better half Clara – ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’, ‘Die Lorelei’ and ‘Sie liebten sich beide’. Their excellent rendition brought out all the emotional honesty of these well-crafted pieces. Here is Anne Sofie von Otter, accompanied by Hélène Grimaud, in ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ (‘If Your Love Is For Beauty’).

Following this, tenor Ian Bostridge made his appearance. What an amazing career this man has had! Having first taught political theory and 18th-century British history at Oxford, at the age of 27 he took up professional singing, soon establishing himself not just as a leading interpreter of Schubert, Schumann and Britten but also as a presenter and writer on music. This being said, the first thing I noticed about his performing style was the somewhat eccentric gestures: he frequently leaned on the piano, sometimes pressing down on it quite hard. In no way, however, did this detract from my appreciation of the power and directness of his singing. Before the interval we heard Robert Schumann’s Fünf Lieder, Opus 40, and after it his song cycle Liederkreis, Opus 24. In the first group, ‘Der Soldat’ – the third item in the set – was sung with admirable drama and commitment, and in the second, ‘Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen’ (‘I Wandered Among the Trees’ – again the third item) was a masterly display of suppressed emotion. In this recording, Ian Bostridge is singing Liederkreis with pianist Julius Drake.

The final item on the programme – Schumann’s Vier Duette, Opus 78 – was a series of vocal duets that involved all three performers. These lieder have oodles of warmth and lyricism, and in my opinion embody Romanticism at its finest. The YouTube recording of Ian Bostridge singing them – together with soprano Dorothea Röschmann and pianist Graham Johnson – consists of four individual items. Firstly, here is ‘Tanzlied’.

Secondly, ‘Er und Sie’.

Thirdly, ‘Ich denke dein’.

Fourthly and lastly, ‘Familien-Gemälde’.

This set of songs made a great ending to the recital. The two voices were perfectly matched; meanwhile, Giorgini’s accompanying skills were most impressive, as indeed they had been throughout the concert. Especially in No. 3 (‘Ich denke dein’ – ‘I Think of You’), I was so thrilled by the performance, which featured exemplary coordination between the three musicians, that I felt a tingle along my spine. Did I feel regret, at that moment, for the fact that the audience for this concert was so sparse? Not at all – I was too carried away by the sweep and surge of the music.

The first item on the programme was an orchestral work – Haydn’s four-movement Symphony No 64 in A major, Hob. 1/64. It was subtitled Tempora mutantur (‘Times change’) by the composer, this being a quotation from a Latin adage that goes as follows: ‘The times change, and we change with them. How? Time passing makes mankind worse.’ I noticed that although the number of stringed instruments in the orchestra was quite small (for instance, there were only nine violins), the wind section was comparatively well represented; as a result, the winds sometimes overpowered the strings. This made for a certain novelty, however, and I soon got used to the unusual balance of instruments.

Here is a performance of the Haydn symphony by the Schlierbacher Chamber Orchestra. I think the frequent stops and starts in the second movement sound really weird, but please judge for yourself.

The seven musicians appeared in order of age, starting with the youngest. First up was Aktan Odabaşı, a cellist from Ankara (seen below). An outstandingly proficient technician for his 12 years, he gave a confident performance of the first movement of Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 1, followed by Popper’s Hungarian Rhapsody. 

Accompanying him and all subsequent performers who were not pianists was Çağdaş Özkan, who last year released an album of his own compositions and arrangements entitled Anatolian Piano.

We then heard the 13-year-old pianist Elif Naz Ertuğrul (pictured above), who is currently undergoing training at the Salzburg Mozarteum and is also a composer, play the first two movements of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 1. This was followed by Chopin’s Fantasy-Impromptu in C sharp minor, in which although not totally in control, she nevertheless impressed with her technique.

She was followed by Eren Parmakerli, a 15-year-old (seen below) who gave us the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 3, then Chopin’s Ballade No 3. Among all the young performers we heard, he was one of those who struck me as having the highest degree of maturity and musical sensitivity to complement his unquestionable technical competence.

Since the age of ten, Parmakerli has been receiving tuition at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. He is also being coached by Gülsin Onay. Judging by the quality of his musicianship – in particular, the excellence of his phrasing and his understanding of dynamics – it is not difficult to predict that we will soon be hearing him on the concert platform.

Nil Canbaz, the fourth performer (seen above), was a 16-year-old clarinettist who is a student at the Dokuz Eylül University State Conservatoire in Izmir; she first played Weber’s Clarinet Concertino, then the feisty No 3 of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke. Despite a few squeaks here and there, she negotiated the transitions between registers with ease, overcoming the considerable difficulties in both pieces with panache. (Here, Çağdaş Özkan deserves an honourable mention for coping successfully with Schumann’s virtuosic piano accompaniment.)

Next came violinist Zehra Deniz Coşkun (pictured above), who played Paganini’s Caprice No 24 and the third movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, largely maintaining her pleasing tone and the accuracy of her intonation despite the enormous challenges presented by these pieces.

The sixth young musician to take the stage was flautist Maya Devrim Tanyılmaz. She played Doppler’s Fantaisie pastorale hongroise and Fauré’s Fantaisie, impressing not just with her rapid-fire arpeggios but also with her graceful movements as she swayed in time with the music.

Lastly, violinist Naz İrem Türkmen gave us Tchaikovsky’s Mélodie and Waxman’s Carmen Fantasy. As a result of her training in Istanbul (where she was a pupil of the late Ayla Erduran, 1934-2025), as well as in Munich and Salzburg, she has acquired a formidable technique and a superb tone. Unsurprisingly in view of her outstanding abilities, she has already begun to appear on the concert platform.

Thus this jaw-dropping display of youthful talent came to an end. As Cihat Aşkın explained in his initial speech, this was the sixth time a Gala Concert of this kind had been held. The members of the jury, besides Aşkın himself, were viola-player Efdal Altun, pianist Gökhan Aybulus, conductor Mehmet Girgin, pianist and composer Fazıl Say and cellist Dilbağ Tokay.

Here is the YouTube video.

I hope you enjoy the concert as much as I did! Keep an eye on the Cornucopia Arts Diary for the next Gala Concert.

The first item on the Trio’s programme was Beethoven’s single-movement Allegretto for Piano Trio in B flat major, WoO 39, written in 1812. Their rendition of this piece began in a somewhat inauspicious manner with yells from a baby. However, her father soon took her out for a walk, and the musicians settled down; I noticed that the pianist was swaying in time with the music, obviously enjoying himself. Here is a performance of the work by Wilhelm Kempff (piano), Henryk Szeryng (violin) and Pierre Fournier (cello).

We then heard a piano trio by Professor Yalçın Tura (1934-), the distinguished nonagenarian founder of the Musicology Department at the Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ) Turkish Music State Conservatoire. Despite his advanced age, he continues to compose even today, being known chiefly for his music for films and the theatre. The thing I liked about his Piano Trio was its use of traditional Turkish aksak rhythms, which provide the music with an edgy bite. But the chief drawback to this work (in my opinion) was its harmonic style. The way of harmonising Turkish folk melodies that was adopted by Turkish composers of Western-style music of the 1920s and 1930s was not a particularly subtle one, but it is still, unfortunately, with us. Possibly as a result of the influence of Bartók, who used open fourths and fifths in his settings of Hungarian folk tunes, Turkish composers of the period relied too heavily on these intervals. Personally, I am looking forward to hearing something a little more original in the harmony department after all these years. But I have had my say – back to the concert.

The last piece on the programme was the Piano Trio in A minor by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). During the summer of 1914, Ravel (whose mother was Basque) went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a seaside town in the French Basque country, to compose. At the same time as he was writing his Piano Trio, he was also working on a piano concerto entitled Zazpiak Bat – Basque for ‘The Seven Are One’. The concerto was eventually abandoned, but it left its mark on the Trio’s opening movement, which uses a Basque dance rhythm. The Piano Trio in A minor is a work of considerable difficulty, and I was delighted to see the members of the Bosphorus Trio rise to the occasion. The players’ technical excellence came across immediately in the first movement, which draws on the zortziko, a Basque dance form: the opening theme is in the same rhythm – a bar of eight beats divided 3+2+3 – as that of the Zazpiak Bat piano concerto that Ravel never completed.

This performance of his four-movement Piano Trio in A minor is by violinist Janine Jansen, cellist Torleif Thedéen and pianist Denis Kozhukhin. Ravel’s music has sometimes been criticised for being emotionally disengaged; however, his cold craftsmanship produced some cracking crescendos – just listen to the one that starts at 25:34.

The exhibition this year reaches beyond the city centre into the surrounding landscape with installations at the millennia-old Deyrulzafaran Monastery, the Roman fortress city of Dara and a disused hammam in Kızıltepe, a town just north of the Syrian border. For curator Çelenk Bafra, moving between the venues helps reveal the region’s sometimes contrasting realities.

“There's a utopian, idealised, exoticised aspect to Mardin, but when you dig a little deeper and examine it, you come across the hard ground of truth,” she said. “Art offers a means to learn something new, to look at events from a different perspective … like the swallows we see rising and descending through passing clouds above.”

Curator Çelenk Bafra, at the Deyrulzafaran Monastery, where the bienniale appears for the first time. 

The Mardin Biennial, running through 21 June, has grown into one of the country’s most important contemporary art events outside of Istanbul. This year, more than 40 artists from across the world are showing work in SKYground. Almost a quarter of them have their roots in the region, and at least half of the artists are women.

The region’s art community embraces the Mardin Biennial as a rare and vital opportunity to connect local production with national and international audiences. Parallel events with work by 165 artists have sprung up in spaces across the city, many organised by the artists themselves.

“In this part of the country, beyond Istanbul, the biennale generates significant impact and resonance for artists, creating ripples and waves of influence,” said Rıdvan Kuday, who owns the sole contemporary art gallery in the region’s largest city of Diyarbakir. He is showing work by 18 artists in parallel with the biennale.

Mardin's Ulu Cami's magnificent stone ablution fountain.

Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, born in Thessaloniki and working between Cairo and Paris, meditates on the “in-between state of what we are and what we want to be” in her fabric and audio installation The Bird, the Thread and the Open Sea. 

Kosmatopoulos's vibrant wings and blue sails render the 13th century Sufi poem The Conference of Birds into a physical space to wander through, much as the birds in the Persian allegory search for a truth they ultimately find within themselves.

A pair of snow leopards crouch on the wall of the Deyrulzafaran Monastery in Swarm Works, by Malatya-born and New York-based artist Vahap Avşar. Created for last year’s Bukhara Biennial, the beasts are carved of 200-year-old wood salvaged from the columns of demolished buildings in the Silk Road city. Avşar borrowed a colony from a local beekeeper to implant in the leopards’ torsos. “It is a living sculpture … about empathy, camaraderie and community,” he says.

A still from Basim Magdy’s The Birds Choose the Cards offers an absurdist reflection on a world shaped by war, algorithms and uncertainty. The 2016 film moves through a disquieting sequence of loosely connected images, places and events that Magdy describes as a deliberate “level of ambiguity, even confusion … to open the doors to think about this moment based on people’s own experiences.”

Mardin's persistent winds and terraced houses make kite flying a favourite pastime, and 32-year-old kitemaker Zahit Mungan uses local symbols, such as the benevolent serpent queen Shahmaran and the sacred peacock, to elevate the craft to an art form.

Mungan's House of the Scorpion is a yellow arachnid - both a familiar menace in the arid climate and a local folklore motif - hovering from the ceiling at the Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum.

Athens-based Maro Michalakakos worked with local artisans to produce The Journey, which transforms the braid of a woman’s hair, called kezi in Kurdish and a source of feminine pride, into a large-scale, serpentine weave that recalls the biennale's themes of pilgrimage and self-discovery. The saffron-coloured fabric alludes to Deyrulzafaran, named for the golden tint of its walls that is said to come from saffron mixed into the mortar.

A visit to West Africa inspired Jakup Ferri to transpose his miniature drawings onto textiles. Since 2011, he has worked with Kosovo and Albanian embroiderers who use traditional techniques to create joyous, almost psychedelic tapestries in which animals, humans and imaginary life forms exist on equal footing. 

We,We, from 2022, hints at Ferri’s interest in naïve art. “You have to forget everything you know to make a new image because we are so full from phones,” he says.

Suspended between two columns in Dara’s underground cistern is Turkish artist Alper Aydın's System Failed. The four-metre-tall sculpture captures the moment a serpent devours an angel, a vision of innocence overcome by darkness in a space locals call "the dungeon" after it was used to imprison Armenians before their deportation to the Syrian desert during the First World War.

Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić sits among the ruins of Dara on Agape Bench, inscribed with words for love from different languages. The forged-metal sculpture posits that understanding comes not from perfect translation but through the act of gathering. After the exhibition closes, the bench will remain in Mardin as a permanent gift to the community.

  . 

For Michael Rakowitz, art is a way of restoring what history has tried to erase. In an address at the biennale’s opening, the Chicago-based artist of Iraqi Jewish descent described how the identity he grew up with has been contested since Israel's founding. “I feel a volatile and unjust pressure to admit I’ve made a mistake in identifying as an Arab Jew and for the work I do, as if I should apologise for who I am,” he said. 

A visitor poses besides Rakowitz's papier-mâché surrogate of a relief from the 3,000-year-old palace of Nimrud, destroyed by the Islamic state in Iraq in 2015. It is part of the ongoing project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist that looks at what has been lost by war, exile and cultural theft. 

Carlos Aires stands before the Ateş Beyler Hamam, where his video Sweet Dreams Are Made of This shows riot police dancing a tango to a cover of the 1980s Eurythmics song. The 2016 video matches coercive power with choreographed performance and was made despite Spain’s “gag law” restricting the dissemination of police images. 

Presenting Sweet Dreams Are Made of This in a former bathhouse, a traditional space of male socialisation, echoes tango’s origins as a dance performed between men. At the opening in Kızıltepe, young viewers approached Aires to say the work resonated with them. “All art is political,” the artist says. “It is impossible not to be political while living in the reality of our time.”

Hilal Can stands before Hilmeran, a mythical figure from her sprawling A Place for Those Who Look Within, which unfolds across the chambers of the former hammam. Commissioned for the biennale, the textile mural work reflects SKYground's attempt to bridge seemingly opposing worlds, proposing that the earthly and the cosmic coexist in each of us.

Fatma Alara Akgün and Senem Râbia Sekban of the artist collective Bi Acayip Hane stand by What You See in the Sky Are Not Stars; The Firmament Is Pierced Here and There.The seven-tiered sculpture’s thin layers draw on the Anatolian folk artist Aşık Veysel’s I’m on a Long and Narrow Road about the life-long quest for truth, while fragmentary scenes can be glimpsed within the object through small apertures.

Hüseyin Aksoy, who is from Kızıltepe, builds an intricate, Escheresque world rooted in archaeology and mythology in A Review on a Creation of a Civilization (2026), rendered in walnut paint and watercolour.

Among dozens of parallel events coinciding with the Mardin Biennial is an exhibition of photographer Amar Kılıç’s monochromatic landscapes from remote corners of southeastern Turkey, many long difficult to access for security reasons, alongside his delicate cyanotypes cast onto fabric.

Work made by children participating in Fotohane Darkroom, a community photography programme run by Kılıç and Serbest Salih, are also on display at the studio situated in a historical Mardin stone house.

“I wanted to take a real piece of the plain and force people to look at it,” says Mahmut Akdemir of No Phoenixes Remain in the Plain to Rise From the Ashes, a charred patch of earth blanketed in styrofoam eggs atop a roof to show the harm of stubble fires on the grasslands below. The 31-year-old Mardin artist’s is also showing his pixelated mosaic glasswork at a parallel gallery event.

A balloon seller waits outside of Dara's ancient necropolis.

Mardin Biennial is on till 21 June. Several flights a day leave from Istanbul Airport and Sabiha Gokçen. https://en.mardinbienali.org/

Read 'Mardin: City of Labyrinths' in issue 68 by Barnaby Rogerson, photos by Monica Fritz.
 

The proceedings began with an announcement that the scheduled conductor – a lady from Columbia by the name of Lina Gonzáles-Granados – would be replaced by someone else. I did not catch the name of that ‘someone else’, but I can definitely say that it was a man, and that his name sounded Turkish. I hereby apologise to whoever it was for my failure to recognise and put a name to him.

The first item to be performed was Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 in E minor, Opus 11, a work that dates from 1830, when the composer was 20 years old. It was actually written immediately after the premiere of his Piano Concerto No 2, but was published before it – thus the wrong-way-round numbering. The opening of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 was said by the music critic Harold C. Schonberg (1915-2003), author of The Great Pianists, to be ‘too close to be coincidental’ to the 1816 Piano Concerto No 2 in A minor by the Bratislava-born composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), a man whose name I mistakenly took to be ‘Johann Neopunk Hummel’ when I first came across it. (Hummel, an important figure in the transition from the Classical era to the Romantic, was far more famous in his lifetime than he is now. A child prodigy, at the age of 8 he came to the attention of Mozart, who both taught and housed him free of charge for two years. Hummel later became a good friend of Beethoven, and in addition was a key figure in the fight against unethical music publishers and in the establishment of the principles of intellectual property and copyright law.)

The first performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 took place on October 11, 1830 in Warsaw with the composer himself at the piano, and was received with thunderous applause. Seven weeks later, following the ‘November Uprising’ in Poland – an armed rebellion against the occupation of that country by the Russian Empire – he played it again in Paris, and once again it met with a highly enthusiastic reception. The next day François-Joseph Fétis, writing in La Revue musicale, said: ‘There is spirit in these melodies, there is fantasy in these passages, and everywhere there is originality’. More recent critics have criticised the concerto’s orchestration, which is admittedly nothing to write home about, but others have defended it on the grounds that the orchestral backing is knowingly made low key so as not to compete with the piano, and that the simplicity of the orchestral arrangement is in deliberate contrast with the complexity of the harmony.

This brief description of the concerto on the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra and Music School website is by Dr. Michael Fink. It takes you through each of the three movements, giving you just enough – but not too much – technical detail.

Gülsin Onay appeared on stage wearing a long, trailing bluish-purple gown. Her rendition of the Chopin was exemplary – well up to the standard of all the previous performances of this composer’s works that I have heard from her. Her phrasing was, as always, a delight: she has the gift of making even the most insignificant passages sound meaningful and musically satisfying. It was very much to the orchestra’s credit that although the soloist allowed herself a certain amount of leeway in the rubato department, they invariably followed her with precision. During this movement, a white cat appeared briefly on the stage, but soon disappeared again. I took this as a sign that Bastet (the Egyptian goddess of home, domesticity, fertility, childbirth and cats) was giving her seal of approval to the performance, and – who knows – maybe to Women’s Day as well.

In the slow movement of the concerto, all the woodwind entries were clean and well co-ordinated. The piano, meanwhile, sank to a breathless hush, thus adding to the dramatic effect. In the finale, Ms. Onay initially played more loudly than she had done in the first movement (no doubt to create a contrast with the subdued slow movement), and later on impressed with some rapid scales and flourishes that were played pianissimo despite their technical difficulty. The orchestra was once again perfectly in time with the soloist, but the former horn-player in me did not fail to notice the foul note in one of the horn fanfares. This did not, however, detract from my enjoyment of what was overall an excellent performance. Gülsin Onay’s Pisces moon (in harmonious trine aspect to her Saturn in ‘still waters run deep’ Scorpio and in comfortable sextile to her well-disciplined Mars in Capricorn) always succeeds in casting a spell over the proceedings thanks to ‘master of illusions’ Neptune the sealord, ruler of Pisces and patron of all creative and ethereal arts.  

The following rendition of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 1 is by Martha Argerich with the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra, conducted by Jacek Kaspszyk.

The second half of the concert on March 13 was scheduled to consist of the Symphony No 2 by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931). In the event, however, the work that was actually played was the Symphony No 3 by the French lady composer Louise Farrenc, née Dumont (1804-75). The daughter of a sculptor who came from a long line of sculptors, Ms. Farrenc was brought up in a cultured environment, and thus began studying the piano at an early age, taking lessons from a student of Muzio Clementi. She soon showed great promise as a pianist, and as a result was taken on as a pupil by masters such as the Bohemian-Jewish virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles (a colleague and friend of both Beethoven and Mendelssohn who lived in London for twenty years – he persuaded the Philharmonic Society to send money to the impoverished Beethoven during his final illness) and Johann Nepomuk Hummel – interesting how he surfaces once again!

But although Ms. Farrenc wished to add composition to her musical portfolio, the doors of the Paris Conservatoire remained firmly closed to her owing to – yes, you guessed it! – their ponderously iron-clad glass ceiling: no women were allowed to enrol in the composition department (or in any other, for that matter). Undeterred, she took private lessons in counterpoint and fugue from Anton Reicha, a teacher at the institution, and – judging by the standard of her later works – must have learned well. During the 1820s and 1830s she wrote a number of pieces for the piano, some of which earned praise from none other than Robert Schumann. Later on, she turned to writing chamber music, and it was in this area that she produced some of her best pieces: her 1849 Nonet for Winds and Strings, Opus 38, is now regarded as her finest work (although the idea of combining a string quartet with a wind quintet had first occurred not to her, but to the German composer Louis Spohr, 1784-1859). When it received its first performance at the Salle Érard in March 1850, her Nonet made her a celebrity on the Paris music scene. In 1861, she published an influential book – Le Trésor des pianistes – about how to perform both earlier and more contemporary music; typically, it appeared under her husband’s name, not her own.

Louise Farrenc’s music displays a high level of technical competence, and – not having heard of her before – I was pleasantly surprised by its quality. However, although I admire the lady’s pluck in overcoming the obstacles placed in her way by the musical establishment and respect her for producing pieces that are professionally crafted, I would not go to a concert that consisted entirely of her works. I remained, I fear, less than riveted by her Symphony No 3, finding it agreeable, but very much shaped by the expectations of the time, and thus unrelievedly anodyne. There is such a thing as quality in music, and technical competence, while a prerequisite of quality, is not the end of the story. I want to be excited by what I hear, not just titillated by its novelty or impressed for any reason not directly connected with the music itself.

Anyway, rather than giving ear to the strictures of a carping critic, please judge for yourself. Firstly, here is the Wikipedia entry for Louise Farrenc. Secondly, here is a recording of her Symphony No 3 in G minor, Opus 36, by the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Mikko Franck.

Thirdly and lastly, an audio podcast about her Symphony No 3 by two people who have a high regard for it.

But to return to this admirable lady’s life path: in 1821 she married Aristide Farrenc, a flautist who eventually became a music publisher of note. After giving birth to a daughter in 1826, she embarked on a successful career as a concert pianist. This led to her being appointed (in 1842) to a permanent position as Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire, becoming the only woman to hold this post – one of the most prestigious in the musical world – during the whole of the 19th century. However, despite her reputation as an excellent teacher, for the first eight years of her time at the Conservatoire this crustily patriarchal body refused to pay her the same salary as her male colleagues. It was only in March 1850, after the triumphant first performance of her above-mentioned Nonet, in which the celebrated violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim took part, that her demands for equal pay with the male professors were heeded. Joachim subsequently championed the work on the concert platform, and it became famous throughout Europe.

I have, I fear, to end on a sorry note. Friday, March 13 was the day on which the distinguished historian, author and broadcaster Prof. İlber Ortaylı passed away. Gülsin Onay gave us the news before her performance, and dedicated her encore – the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – to his memory. I had seen Prof. Ortaylı in the audience at several concerts I attended, and once had lunch with him (not one-to-one, but as one of a party of people) at Topkapı Palace. So I will conclude by paying my respects to this major icon of Turkish culture. He will be sorely missed. Allah rahmet eylesin.

Phillipo was born in Arapgir, in modern-day Türkiye, in a region then known as the Armenian Highlands. His early life included service as a horse soldier in the Persian army, before he established himself in Aleppo, a city that stood at the centre of Levantine trade.

In 1767 Phillipo travelled to London, where he demonstrated Turkish leather dyeing techniques before the Society of Arts, earning the Society’s Gold Medal. Phillipo also imported Eastern horses into England, which he sold to the great horse breeders of the day. Aleppo was then a vital hub for this trade and Phillipo’s trade via the Levant Company placed him at its centre. On one of his journeys to London, Phillipo also had his portrait painted by Richard Cosway, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1771.

Phillipo’s presence was part of wider Armenian activity in London, which included figures such as the adventurer Joseph Emin, a friend of Edmund Burke, and the merchant Johannes Padre Rafael, who brought a case against East India Company officials in the London courts. Through their connections with the Levant and India, these individuals formed part of a diasporic network that connected the intellectual and commercial life of Enlightenment Britain to the wider world.

Theodore Mould read History at the University of Edinburgh and Art History at the Courtauld Institute. His work has been published in The Burlington Magazine and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has worked at Artclear, a technology company digitising the transaction of physical works of art and Anthony Mould Ltd, a London art dealership specialising in British art. He is currently training to become a barrister.

Nicolas Bringuier

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 in E flat major, Opus 73, sometimes called the ‘Emperor Concerto’, was written in 1809 under extremely difficult conditions: in May of that year Napoleon’s army was bombarding Vienna from the heights surrounding it, and Beethoven said in a letter to his publisher that around him there was ‘nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts’. In order to preserve his hearing, which by this time was becoming seriously impaired, he fled to his brother’s cellar and covered his ears with pillows. Despite this precaution, however, his hearing continued to decline, thus preventing him from playing the piano part at the work’s first performance in Leipzig on February 12, 1812. (Interestingly, the concert at the AKM took place within a day of the 214th anniversary of this occasion.)

Although this work is known today as the ‘Emperor Concerto’, this is not a title Beethoven himself gave to it, and the emperor concerned is certainly not Napoleon. The composer had initially seen Napoleon as a liberator who was on track to overthrow Europe’s oppressive monarchies, and indeed had dedicated his Symphony No 3, the ‘Eroica’, to him; however, this dedication was withdrawn when Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor in 1804. Five years, and many bloody battles, later, Beethoven was even less starry-eyed about the man who was causing him – and the armies of the Fifth Coalition, led by Austria and Britain, who were defeated by the French at the Battle of Wagram in July 1809 at the cost of over 70,000 lives – so much grief. The dedicatee of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 was in fact Archduke Rudolf of Austria, who a few years earlier had begun to study piano and composition with him, eventually became his friend, and continued to meet up with him until 1824. Other works dedicated to Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainier, Archduke of Austria, Prince Royal of Hungary and Bohemia and Cardinal-Archbishop of Olomouc (1788-1831), were the Archduke Trio, the Piano Sonata No 26 (‘Les Adieux’), the Piano Sonata No 29 (the ‘Hammerklavier’), and the Missa Solemnis.

In view of all the military activity that was going on at the time, it is hardly surprising that this concerto should have – especially in the long and somewhat grandiose first movement, which is in the ‘heroic’ key of E flat major – a distinctly military air. First reactions to the work were mostly positive, although its unusual length (approximately 40 minutes) drew some criticism. What those audience members who were musically clued in liked about it were its frequent contrasts of style, mood and key, and its novel features, which were many. Firstly, contrary to tradition (which dictated that a concerto should begin with a statement of the main theme or themes by the orchestra), this one begins with some flourishes from the piano playing on its own – thus continuing a trend begun in the composer’s Piano Concerto No 4. Secondly, while other concertos allowed the soloist to show off his technical skills in a cadenza of his own composition, this concerto has a fully written-out one; in fact, Beethoven specifically forbade pianists to depart from it in any way. Thirdly, the finale follows the previous movement (a relaxing nocturne in which the strings are muted) without a break – another departure from tradition. All these features were adopted, with some individual variation, by subsequent composers.   

But the real upsetter of the apple-cart was Beethoven’s redefinition of the relationship between the orchestra and the soloist. In Mozart’s time, a piano concerto had been a ‘polite dialogue’ in which the two acted as co-creators. Beethoven, a far tougher cookie, transformed this relationship into a dramatic dialogue, playing with the tension between them. The orchestra, far from being a mere accompanying element, now becomes a protagonist in the back-and-forth. The piano does not just repeat themes played by the orchestra: it develops them, exploring their possibilities and taking the music into unexpected places, meanwhile allowing the soloist to fully exploit the instrument’s capabilities. Thus, the pianist becomes a vector for the composer’s inventive mind. Here, we see the reason for the ban on alternative cadenzas: Beethoven wanted his cadenza, which he uses as a medium for the further development of his themes, to play its part in the movement’s overall structure, and not be replaced by any irrelevant finger-flexing. And as a result of all this playing around with themes to see what places they could be taken to on their journey of exploration, that overall structure now took on the character of a symphony.

You may have noticed that I rarely list a performance of a work by Beethoven: the reason for this is that so many excellent ones are available, and it is hard to choose between them – as well as unjust to those performances that are rejected. In this instance, however, I will break my rule and list one in which the soloist is Lang Lang. The orchestra is unfortunately unnamed, but the conductor is Christoph Eschenbach. I think Lang Lang’s extraverted – not to say punchy – style goes well with Beethoven’s forthrightness. Others may disagree. (Actually, the current concentration of planets in Mars-ruled Aries may have had something to do with my choice of a feisty pianist rather than a fluffy one.)

The performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5 at the Atatürk Cultural Centre on February 13 was marked by some expressive flourishes from the pianist (in terms of arm movements as well as those of an interpretative variety), especially at the end of his phrases. Nicholas Bringuier, born in Nice in 1980, was trained first at the Conservatoire there, then at the Paris Conservatoire (where he was awarded first prize in a piano competition at the age of 16, subsequently going on to complete a Master’s degree at this same institution), and finally at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he was taught by the celebrated pedagogue Klaus Hellwig (1941-). At the beginning of the first movement, Bringuier demonstrated his excellent technique in some rapid arpeggios. I thought his use of the pedal just a tad excessive, but the extra volume certainly added to the grand sweep of this majestic tour de force.

In the second movement, the orchestra’s entries (always a danger area in a slow-moving piece) were invariably perfectly co-ordinated. The woodwinds never strayed out of tune; the horns produced a successful duet, as indeed they had done in the first movement, and an ultra-soft and gentle entry from the pianist showed that he could be sensitive as well as spirited. I have to say that he overdid the diplomacy a little in the finale, in which one of the tunes he played did not come through the orchestral background, but in the main his performance was confident and convincing as well as technically impressive. For an encore, he gave us Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude (Opus 10, No 12 in C minor), playing it in the portentously demonstrative manner the piece demands.

In the second half, the orchestra played the Symphonie fantastique by the French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-69). This programmatic symphony, which mirrors events in the composer’s love life in a highly exaggerated way, depicts the sufferings of a romantic artist who poisons himself with opium because of his unrequited love for a beautiful woman. (In reality this was Harriet Smithson, a Shakespearean actress of Irish extraction with whom Berlioz was obsessed; he eventually persuaded her to marry him, but unfortunately things did not work out at all well between them.) The first movement of this, the composer’s most famous work, is entitled ‘Daydreams – Passions’; it introduces the recurring idée fixe – the love theme. In the second movement, the hero attends a ball. Following this, there is a pastoral interlude (the fact that the symphony has five movements, an unusual number at the time of its composition, is a nod to Beethoven’s similarly five-movement Symphony No 6, the ‘Pastoral’). This rural revel is followed (in the fourth movement) by a hallucinatory march to the scaffold: in this parallel reality, it seems, our hero has unalived his ladylove, and is now receiving his just deserts. In the finale, he finds himself in the middle of a witches’ sabbath – a ‘diabolical orgy’ in which his lover takes part. (Cries of “Shame!”)

In his description of the Symphonie fantastique on the LA Phil website, Herbert Glass makes several important points, one of which is that in this work, Berlioz creates ‘not only a mood (as in Liszt’s symphonic poems), but also states of mind and precise, physical situations. Nothing like it had been attempted on this scale before. Berlioz’s new concept of how far one could go in dramatic music without resorting to a vocal text caused considerable polemicising over whether such music was viable without reference to the ‘story’.’ Glass’s article fills this information gap by telling you what is supposed to be happening in each movement. The Dies irae (‘Wrath of God’) tune that is heard in the finale, by the way, is a 13th-century Latin hymn that forms part of the Roman Catholic Church’s Requiem or ‘Liturgy for the Dead’; it describes the Last Judgement and the world turning to ashes. When I said that this work ‘mirrors events in the composer’s love life in a highly exaggerated way’, I wasn’t joking.

In a blog on a concert last November in which Berlioz’s Nuits d’été was played, I said of the Symphonie fantastique that it ‘has its moments, especially in the witches’ knees-up at the end – a piece of Hollywood grotesquerie that must surely be the ultimate 19th-century Gothfest.’ The conductor Leonard Bernstein, meanwhile, described the work in somewhat more colourful terms: “Berlioz tells it like it is ... You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral. Take a tip from Berlioz: that music is all you need for the wildest trip you can take, to hell and back.” Tut-tut! Stiff upper lips rule OK. I have to say, though, that whoever programmed this work for Friday 13th must have been making a point of some kind ... Anyway, I was relieved to find that nothing eschatologically untoward took place, and no-one put anything chemically inappropriate in my coffee during the interval.

In this recording, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is being played by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Colombian-Austrian conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

The performance by the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Nicholas Bringuier’s brother Lionel with great skill. His conscientious and well-timed instructions to the orchestra were admirably clear, and he received the reward for his pains in the form of an excellent rendition. All the speedings-up and slowings-down came off without any co-ordination issues; we heard some fine solos from the horns and woodwinds, and I especially enjoyed the dramatic beginning of the fourth movement, in which the occasional exclamations from the brass department were played to perfection. I found the ‘pastoral’ third movement a little tedious, but that was not the fault of either the orchestra or the conductor: frankly, Beethoven does bucolic stuff better than Berlioz. The ‘bells of hell’ in the finale did not always sound exactly on time, but that is the only criticism of the performance I can make from the technical point of view.

After all this ‘gloom, doom and broomsticks’ stuff, I would like to end with something fresh and innocent: here is Berlioz’s Christmas song L’Adieu des bergers à la Sainte Famille, a moving piece whose title is usually anglicised as ‘The Shepherds’ Farewell’. It comes from his 1854 oratorio L’enfance du Christ. I know it’s out of season, but the beautiful choral writing is something not to be missed, and this recording (which comes with the vocal score and a piano reduction of the orchestral parts) has an exceptionally rich bass line. Enjoy!