Barbican Hall
Elgar – Symphony no.1 in A-flat major, op.55
Sir Colin Davis remains in
recovery from a recent illness, so Vasily Petrenko stepped in to conduct this
concert, the programme unchanged. Petrenko’s way with Beethoven and Elgar was certainly
very different from what one would have expected – and doubtless heard – from Davis,
but there was much to intrigue, especially in Elgar.
From the outset of Beethoven’s
Fifth Piano Concerto, there was no doubt that Petrenko intended to make full
use of the capabilities of the LSO – no fashionable scaling down here – just as
Simon Trpčeski would employ the full resources of his Steinway. The tempo was
fast, faster than my general preference, but that is neither here nor there; it
suited the performance, which was very much of the here and now rather than a
probing of Wagnerian metaphysics. A muscular exposition tutti did not detract
from characterful woodwind playing. Petrenko’s reading was rhythmically
insistent, very different from the more flexible and harmonically-grounded
Beethoven one hears from, say, Daniel Barenboim, or would have done from
Furtwängler. It was highly martial, perhaps too much so at times, but I was
intrigued to hear Beethoven’s score here more as a successor to Mozart at his
most public (the 25th Piano Concerto, rather than the 22nd,
despite the key), albeit with greater menace, or indeed to the military brass
interventions in Haydn’s late masses, inevitably putting one in mind ultimately
of precedents for the Missa solemnis.
Trpčeski’s performance was finely shaded, always clear, notably in the cruel
left-hand passagework, unfailingly even in tone. The moment of return was a
high point, piano and orchestra together veritably blazing. A songful,
intermezzo-like character was granted the slow movement, clearly informed by
experience in Romantic (post-Beethoven) piano concertos: Schumann, even, more
controversially, Chopin and Tchaikovsky. I was not entirely convinced, but it
made me think, and it was a welcome luxury to hear such warmth from the
deep-pile LSO string section. The finale was taken at a fast tempo too, but was
carried off well. Trpčeski voiced those extremely difficult chords in the
opening bars to perfection, though there were occasional examples later on when
heavy-handedness intervened. There were a couple of odd instances of slowing
down, pianist later echoed by conductor, so they would seem to have been the
products of conscious decisions. That
bassoon solo emerged unscathed from the preceding orchestral onslaught.
After the interval, Elgar’s
First Symphony opened arrestingly with deliberate tread, almost as if the
glorious celebration of a hero passed (a successor, perhaps, to Siegfried, or
even to the hero of the Eroica?), sad
yet defiant. The main Allegro, by
contrast, opened in fast and furious fashion, quite un-Boult-like, though its
fragility would soon be exposed. The score often sounded closer to Tchaikovsky
than Brahms, especially at its most frenetic, the LSO brass ablaze. This was an
unabashedly Romantic reading, which yet did not preclude uncertainty, above all
at the close. The second movement – I suppose one ought not to call it a
scherzo, since Elgar did not – also opened furiously, by turn thereafter
balletic and martial. (I could almost imagine it danced.) It was quite
different from any performance I could recall, yet clearly from conviction
rather than a desire to ‘say something new’ for the sake of it. I found it exhilarating.
The slow movement emerged with almost Mahlerian intensity from the strings, the
warmth and generosity of their vibrato throughout a standing rebuke to the
Norringtonian tendency. Echoes of Wagner – sighing phrases, choice harmonic
shifts, baleful English horn (Christine Pendrill) – were sung freely.
Instability was never far from the surface, despite the often ravishing beauty
of the performance. Though the opening of the finale was well-nigh obliterated
by a barrage of coughing, it emerged from bronchial envelopment with a nice
sense of fantastical revisiting: a tribute to Strauss? The Allegro recaptured earlier fury, yet quite rightly seemed to struggle;
‘hard-won’ would be misleading, since it was never clear that victory had been
attained. Astonishingly, even today, Elgar sometimes needs to be rescued from
provincial devotees, who would confine him to the ranks of merely ‘English
composers’. In this fine performance, he was triumphantly, which is in another
sense also to say equivocally, rescued.
