Outstanding Success for Fröst in Wigmore Hall 2010/03

2010-03-25 |  OUTSTANDING SUCCESS FOR FRÖST IN WIGMORE HALL

Last week Martin Fröst made an huge success with a full evening recital at Wigmore Hall in another ground breaking programme “Danse Serpentine” together with Roland Pöntinen. The sold out hall was raving and half of the audience was Students!


Sunday Telegraph

Welcome touch of Frost
Sunday Telegraph, The; London (UK), Mar 28, 2010 | by JOHN ALLISON
Martin Frost *****

The hall's lingering reputation for staidness was swept away onTuesday by the clarinettist Martin Frost,who had the audience singing along with his encore.

A very physical player, this Swedish virtuoso treats his instrument as almost an extension of his body.Not for him that fussing with reeds and mouthpieces: launching himself straight into the first of Lutoslawski's excitable Dance Preludes,he showed that he means business.And the charismatic wizardry he brought to Poulenc's Clarinet Sonata can seldom have been witnessed since Benny Goodman gave its posthumous premiere together with Leonard Bernstein.

Commanding a rare range of tonal colour,Frost was melting, nimble and witty in works by Debussy, Jean Francaix and Astor Piazzolla. His pianist, Roland Pontinen, had composed a coiling Danse Serpentine especially for this concert.Their warmly riotous medley on klezmer themes walked several musical tightropes at once, but the highlights were their brilliant yet soulful arrangements (after Joseph Joachim's violin versions) of four Brahms Hungarian Dances.






THE TIMES WRITES
His virtuosity lies in his exceptional dexterity and agility — revealed immediately in the intricate dance rhythms of Lutoslawski’s 1954 Dance Preludes — and in his daring control of the instrument’s dynamic and expressive extremes. Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata of 1962, the most substantial work of the evening, was torn between drollery and despair. Fröst’s body incarnated both the fragility of the silk-spun song of sadness at its heart and the coiled anger within the bittersweet outer movements.
Fröst’s regular recital partner, the pianist Roland Pöntinen, had a central solo spot of his own, and offered some nicely unpredictable moments with five Debussy Preludes. Pöntinen’s own Danse Serpentine was written specially for this Wigmore Hall premiere, and its eight minutes of curves and flurries were an artfully shaped showpiece for both performers as tone-colourists.
Either side of this new piece came the fantastical Tema con variazioni by Jean Françaix, and a sultry, drifting haze of tango in Fröst and Pöntinen’s reinvention of Piazzolla’s Oblivion. A wonderfully imaginative arrangement of Joachim’s own violin and piano version of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances earlier was balanced by the Klezmer grand finale: a virtuoso maelstrom of Hungarian and klezmer music.



Martin Fröst, Roland Pöntinen, Wigmore Hall
Wednesday, 24 March 2010 10:36
Written by Edward Seckerson
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The feline Martin Fröst - actor, dancer, and clarinettist
Photo: Mats Bäcker

It’s tempting to say that if Martin Fröst didn’t play the clarinet then he’d be an actor or a dancer. But he is an actor and a dancer and at one point during this scintillating recital he even sang, too – whilst playing the clarinet at the same time, of course. That’s a given. It’s an extension of his lissom body, and in his shiny grey silk suit and untucked shirt he looked decidedly feline. Ever heard a clarinet purr? Ever heard it yowl, scamper, hiss, scratch? Has anyone ever pulled so many colours from the old liquorice stick?
His programme with pianist Roland Pöntinen – adhering to Fröst like a second skin – was very much built around dance in its many guises. Witold Lutoslawski’s Dance Preludes alternated between the folksily frenetic and the sensuously soulful. We know that Fröst can articulate like a demon, his fingers a blur of hyperactivity, his head hunched forward ready to pounce or flung back in a kind of wild ecstasy. But then he’ll produce exquisite legatos on barely a breath of sound. The two Andantino movements of the Lutoslawski were sweet nothings whispered in our collective ears.

And what other clarinettist makes one think of gypsy fiddlers in the sheer panache of their pyrotechnics? He doesn’t articulate like a wind player but rather with the speedy audacity of a well-rosined bow on gut strings. He and Pöntinen pretty much out did Brahms’ muse Joachim with their lithe and beguiling take on four Hungarian Dances. But in between came Francis Poulenc’s divine Clarinet Sonata – a mix of cartoonish animation and jazzy small hours solitude. Fröst’s knees bent, his body twisted and turned seductively as he traced out the central Romanza in phrasing you could see as well as hear and feel. Absolute control and sheer poetry. The pianissimo return was miraculous.

The second half was yet more exotic. Debussy’s Première rhapsodie was a siren song, haunting and febrile, awash with decadent blue notes; Jean Françaix’s Tema con variazioni was louche and then circus-like with a cadenza which stretched dynamics like slapstick. And then it was tango time as a single note emerged on a slow crescendo from nothing (how does he do that?) and he and Pöntinen slunk into Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion like the perfect dancing partners they are and moved in perfect symmetry to its aching pas de mort.

The Klezmer came last – a raucous and inevitable grand finale in which Fröst pulled out all the special effects he hadn’t yet deployed – the lewd glissandi, the slurs, the coarse gravelly overtones, the fluttery high-speed gallops. The familiar “knees-up” ditties came thick and fast, he and Pöntinen (again joint arrangers) coming on strong like a shambolic chorus line from the Yiddish Theatre.

And if you foolishly thought there was no following that, you won’t have reckoned upon his powers of persuasion to engage the entire audience in a chorus of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria with his own limpid accompaniment. That was bizarre, to say the least, but no more, no less, than you would expect from Fröst. He is nothing if not a surreal experience, a true performance artist, as unpredictable as he is brilliant.