The City Gate to Valletta is currently flanked by large posters advertising the diverse performances and events that the Malta International Arts Festival 2025 has to offer. Among these is a cartoon image of a winged, muscled devil in almost balletic pose, back turned to dark clouds and a fiery sunrise. Based on Vladimir Tytla’s animation of the penultimate sequence from Disney’s Fantasia (1940), the illustration is promoting the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO) concert (Saturday 21st June, Teatru Manoel), titled ‘Between Heaven and Hell’, that forms part of the Festival. The programmatic title has an air of theological profundity, yet the promise of Musorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain in the posthumous version by Rimsky-Korsakov made famous by the Disney movie suggests more of a commercial orientation. In the end, the concert was an odd mixture of these two tendencies.
Firstly, a summary of the whole programme: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and tubular bell; Ruben Zahra’s Land of the Dead for solo violin and orchestra, performed by Daniel Auner; following an interval, soloist Auner returned in Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso; then Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1; and finally, Musorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov’s Night on Bald Mountain.
I described the concert title as ‘programmatic’: as far as orchestral concert music goes, ‘programme music’ is a term used to refer to any music (but particularly orchestral) that tells a story, that is, music with a narrative ‘programme’, typically in the form of a literary text distributed to audiences ahead of time (think of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, in some ways the progenitor of narrative musical works about the witches’ sabbath). The final two works in this concert – Mephisto Waltz No. 1 and Night on Bald Mountain – are both tone poems that tell a devilish tale. Going by the title alone (and the audience could only go by the title and the meagre, somewhat technical description of the work in the festival booklet), Zahra’s Land of the Dead (2025) might fall into the same broad genre. Was this the premiere performance of Zahra’s concerto? It seems likely, all things considered, but ultimately the audience was kept in the dark.
This new work by Zahra, who also serves as Artistic Director of this year’s Festival, has several hallmarks that characterise him as a composer: driving rhythmic motifs and syncopation, folklike idioms and exoticist modal harmony. But Zahra’s Land of the Dead goes farther stylistically and seems almost to incorporate elements from the rest of the concert programme: the ethereal high strings (Cf. the opening of Pärt’s Cantus), the virtuosic use of the violin as the Devil’s own instrument (Cf. Mephisto Waltz No. 1), violent orchestral surges and lunges (Cf. Night on Bald Mountain). Overall, the work has these regular, foursquare patterns, both in terms of underlying metre and phrase structure, on top of which the vigorously demanding solo violin part gives fragmentary, quasi-improvisatory utterances in dialogue with various sections of the orchestra (I found the combination with harp to be particularly evocative). It’s almost anti-soloistic at times, in the sense that the violin is constantly being absorbed into the larger orchestral texture, yet without being sonically overwhelmed.
It was generally a solid, competent performance from the MPO under Resident Conductor Michael Laus but somewhat lacking in inspiration or verve. For instance, Night on Bald Mountain never quite reached that state of sheer terror and wild abandon that the piece demands (tempo probably has a lot to do with it). Even in the quietest moments, such as the very opening of Pärt’s plaintive Cantus, more time could have been taken to set the mood (to allow admitted latecomers a moment to settle down) before the first note of the tolling tubular bell. In terms of acoustic balance, the percussion and brass, and to a lesser extent the woodwind, tend to carry poorly in the auditorium, the sound getting somehow trapped on stage, although the Liszt and the Musorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov featured some fabulous solo and ensemble playing. (Incidentally, no programme was provided where the orchestral musicians might have been credited by name.)
There was a kind of narrative symmetry to the programme, it turns out: it was as if the death knell of Pärt’s Cantus returned in the eerie coda of Night on Bald Mountain (from heaven to hell and back again?). Rimsky-Korsakov in his arrangement of Musorgsky’s work could not resist adding a sentimentally tinged, redemptive ending, with full Wagnerian plagal cadence to cast the whole infernal affair in a sort of divine radiance (Musorgsky’s original work is quite different in this respect and deserves to be heard more often). And so the concert ended slowly, softly, on a consoling note of evil vanquished. How about, next time, for a change, a concert programme that ends properly in hell, or at least in limbo?
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Malta International Arts Festival 2025
Between Heaven and Hell – Malta Philharmonic Orchestra
Teatru Manoel, Valletta, 21 June 2025
Malta Philharmonic Orchestra
Violin – Daniel Auner
Conductor – Michael Laus
