Bohemian Rhapsodies from the LPO and Edward Gardner

A clever if geographically suspect marketing conceit unites two concerts in the LPO’s ongoing season. This was the first: four 20th-century pieces from central and eastern Europe which, to continue the pop analogy, have made a comeback in recent years. 

Lately championed by Sakari Oramo, the music of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz opened proceedings. A resilient piece of wartime neoclassicism that fully deserves its newfound popularity with schedulers, her Overture was not quite crisp enough here, such was the headlong dash with which Gardner animated its invention. 

The LPO played Martinů’s masterly Sixth Symphony or ‘Fantaisies symphoniques’ only last season but the composer, even more prolific than Bacewicz, is not in truth on top form in his Second Violin Concerto. Writing brilliantly in the New York Herald Tribune in January 1944, Paul Bowles emerged vaguely dissatisfied from an early performance given by its dedicatee Mischa Elman, with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He complained of the music’s fragmentary nature, its tendency to travel through a landscape that doesn’t change or progress, and its over-reliance on orchestral sonority. The solo violin he likened to ‘an annoying insect whose sound the orchestra sometimes manages to chase away’. Such qualms were only partially banished tonight. Josef Špaček, at once lyrical and lean-toned, never once sounded as if he were straining to get round the notes though he is not perhaps the kind of extrovert, even soupy virtuoso for whom the music was intended. There was no doubting his refined sensibility and immaculate intonation and co-ordination between violinist, conductor and orchestra felt spot on. The encore was quite something: a charming, even exquisite rendition of someone’s string quartet arrangement of the most famous of the Dvořák Humoresques, Op. 101. The soloist was joined by LPO principals. 

After the interval the orchestra seemed to up its game. The Fourth Symphony may or may not represent Lutosławski at his best – its symphonic trajectory has always felt elusive to me for all the obvious feeling for colour and gesture – but the players did their level best. Supervising them a now batonless Gardner added expressive full-body gesturing to a Boulezian traffic cop routine. Lutosławski knew how to put on a show and his aleatoric effects work best in live performance.  

And finally Janáček’s tone-poem or ‘rhapsody’ begun in 1915 but as bizarrely original as his later work. Who else would use his trump card so near the start rather than reserving bells (literally) and whistles (not so much) for the big finish? Textures were kept lean and clear, the occasional reticence of the woodwind almost certainly a function of the acoustic properties of the hall as experienced from my privileged perch in the stalls. The Royal Festival Hall’s organ was pressed into service and the stirring epilogue, summoning all the resources of a large orchestra, brought the house down. An ambitious, even audacious evening and a deserved success. How well it did at the box office is another matter.