TÖNEFEST À LA FRANÇAISE
Thurgaukultur.ch, September 2023
There are these concert moments when everything is just right. The Thurgau Youth Orchestra under the direction of Gabriel Estarellas Pascual delighted the audience on Saturday in the Protestant church in Arbon.
Perhaps Charles Gounod would have met Joseph Haydn for a glass of Gumpoldskirchner at the Heurigen when he wrote his first symphony. Of course, that was unfortunately not possible, because symphony father Haydn had already been dead for 44 years in 1853. What Gounod did take over, however, is this precise, restrainedly subversive lightness of foot in the music, which he gave his own timbres.
It can be assumed that the Thurgau Youth Orchestra (JOTG) has spent a long time and intensively studying the work, because the proportions with which this very classically structured piece of music from the French High Romantic period was composed were audibly very clear to everyone who played along. There was no wobble in the cue, in the second movement beautiful, razor-sharp and quiet bass lines wandered through the church and the small fugue nested perfectly into one another.
LINK: THURGAUKULTUR