'Never look directly at a trombone player," said the great composer Richard Strauss. "It only encourages them." Then again, the German composer was hardly being honest about an instrument which Felix Mendelssohn called "the most sacred and noble instrument in the orchestra".
For Arunkorn Chaisubankanok -- who will be playing solo trombone on Friday with the Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra (RBSO) -- this brass was neither sacred nor profane. As a young virtuoso on the ancient instrument, he stepped outside and started to march with the trombone in the Suthiwararam Marching Band. After that, he obviously saw other possibilities, one of which will feature in a concert which encompasses three centuries and four different countries. The next RBSO concert is starting with the Holberg Suite by the world's most popular Norwegian composer. Staying with Scandinavia, Arunkorn will continue with Lars-Erik Larsson's Concertino For Trombone which is popular for all trombonists, though never before played in Thailand. After that, one of the other Bachs -- Johann Christian -- will be shown to see whether daddy, Johann Sebastian Bach, was a great influence.
Finally, we have a Schubert symphony which is both joyous and tragic at the same time.
The conductor of the RBSO is a familiar face and baton here. Wim Steinmann has worked with the orchestra recently, as the first leader under its new name. He is that rare instrumentalist who didn't begin work as a violinist or pianist, but a piccolo/flute soloist. As a student of Valery Gergiev, though, he has made his name as a conductor. Founder and leader of the Rotterdam Domestica -- consisting of the players from the Rotterdam Philharmonic -- he has worked on both chamber orchestral pieces, rarer music and avant-garde opera.
Just as his own chosen instrument is rare, he has a special feeling for other "background" pieces in music, like Arunkorn's trombone.
The soloist is well qualified to play Larsson's Concertino. After his marching-band experience, he was so entranced with his instrument that he attended a "brass workshop", then studied music at Chulalongkorn University. His further teachers might not be household words, but William Damron, Ronald Smart and John Swallow are eminent enough (and obviously proficient enough), so that Arunkorn played first trombone in the Asian Youth Orchestra twice, under Sir Yehudi Menuhin.
Arunkorn Chaisubankanok. photos courtesy of Bangkok Symphony Orchestra Foundation
Larsson's Concertino is one of a dozen-odd pieces he wrote for solo instruments, and has become a classic in trombone literature not only in his native Sweden but around the world.
The other three works here make up a most diverse programme. Perhaps the most popular, for good reason, is Franz Schubert's Fifth Symphony, not a tragic work, but one which breathes sunniness. The opening has been compared to "music coming in through a window", its first theme has been likened to "a perennially youthful Peter Pan". The other three movements have what is called "the chuckling Schubertian smile on its face".
But don't be deceived. This was Schubert already suffering from the disease that would kill him a decade later. And it was also Schubert who was unable to get his music played in Vienna's concert halls. The solution? He brought his friends into his tiny house, they crowded around, passed out the music sheets and played the Fifth Symphony as a gift to themselves, decades before its public performance.
One surprise will come with the name of Johann Bach. Not Johann Sebastian Bach but Johann Christian Bach. Old Daddy Sebastian had around a dozen children (possibly he could afford it since the successful musician had the largest organ in all Europe). Johann Christian was the last child, born when the original Bach was 50.
Still, Sebastian had time to teach his final child, and the son also rose, making his name throughout Europe. Not wishing to compete with his esteemed father, he went first to Italy with one of his brothers, taking a step which would have made his father angry. He converted to Roman Catholicism. Then again, the devout Lutheran Sebastian wrote the most moving Catholic music ever written, Mass In B Minor, so he couldn't have been too upset.
From Italy, where he played in the Milan Cathedral, he went to London, loving the country so much that he stayed there, becoming "the English Bach". When Mozart came to London, Johann Christian took him by the hand, introducing him to all the right people and the best musicians.
If they got along so well, that's because Johann Christian Bach wrote symphonies very much like Mozart's, as audiences will hear in Bangkok. Alas, like Schubert and Mozart, Johann Christian had a sad ending. Mozart's popularity soon exceeded his own, poverty-stricken, he had to borrow money from the Queen, but died in debt of £4,000.
That was not the fate of Edward Grieg, the second Scandinavian on the programme. From his beginning as a pianist, Grieg had dual nationality. He was Norwegian-born, Norwegian-bred and -- in a century which thought German music was the only music -- he brought Norwegian folk songs and harmonies and even special folk violins to the world. Actually from Scottish ancestry, Grieg was loved both in London and the rest of the world. His music included incidental themes for plays (especially Peer Gynt), the piano (including the famed Piano Concerto) and orchestral music like the Holberg Suite. Audiences may well recognise music from the five dance tunes here. But who was Holberg himself? Everybody knows the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, but a century before, Ludvig Holberg wrote plays with an equally humanistic touch, and Grieg wanted to honour him with this 18th century music.
Some say that Grieg was too melodic, too romantic, but his contemporaries loved him. Especially that acerbic old Frenchman Claude-Achille Debussy. Debussy said that Grieg's music tastes like "chocolate candy stuffed with snow".
The composer himself had a more down-to-earth description. "I think my music tastes of codfish," he said. Obviously this is a concert which is meant to satisfy the most heterogenous tastes.
RBSO Classical Concert No.2. - Friday, 8pm at Thailand Cultural Centre, Small Hall. - Ticket prices: 300/600/1,000 baht. - 20% off for Bangkok Bank credit cards (Visa and MasterCard). - 20% off for True customers. - 50% for students. - Book your tickets at ThaiTicketMajor, tel 02-262-3456, thaiticketmajor.com. - BSO Office tel 02 255 6617-18 or visit bangkoksymphony.org.
