This was both an impressive concert in its own right and a more comfortable fit for the RPO’s ongoing ‘Lights in the Dark’ series than some of its scheduled instalments. All three featured composers, obliged to relocate in the face of the existential threat unleashed by oppressive regimes, embraced ‘international’ identities in their own fashion. Vasily Petrenko began with one of his endearingly unreliable if well-intentioned spoken introductions. Musically our starter was ten minutes from Korngold’s score for a Michael Curtiz-directed Errol Flynn swashbuckler. The Sea Hawk is no longer quite the exotic interloper it seemed twenty years ago when André Previn conducted these or similar extracts at the Barbican Hall. The RPO could not muster the tonal depth of the LSO strings but there was plenty of panache. One was pleased to hear the music even if its effect remained somehow less than the sum of its parts, its sections cut and pasted.
Not so Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Here Bruce Liu was a subtler, more lyrical virtuoso than one usually hears in a score intermittently redolent of a Russia that had vanished with the Revolution but also recognisably moving on. It was composed in Switzerland in the modernist villa Rachmaninov had had built for him but which he would shortly feel obliged to vacate as war clouds made a peripatetic existence impractical. Liu, runaway winner of the XVIII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, 2021 and fluent in French, English and Mandarin Chinese, is himself a long-term resident of Montreal. His approach to the work eschewed noisy barnstorming and overt ‘Russian’ Romanticism, employing a wonderfully wide range of timbres and tempos. Realisation of his special sound is presumably aided and abetted by his unusual, vaguely Radu Lupu-like posture at the keyboard. Liu sat on a regular chair to which was attached a discreet padded back rest. A single mis-hit chord only served to highlight the extraordinary perfection and agility of the rest. Maximising the glow and refinement of Rachmaninov’s more sustained passages, Liu provided several variations with witty payoffs that felt completely fresh before demonstrating his thrilling virtuosity in the demonic closing variations. The orchestral accompaniment was spot on too, the famous eighteenth variation as good as it gets. The encore was Liszt with roots in Paganini, a predictably dazzling account of ‘La Campanella’.
Bartók found his new American life a challenge, but the success of the Concerto for Orchestra might have been transformative had not ill-health curtailed his career. The only criticism that might be made of Petrenko’s interpretation was that for all its drive and finesse it lacked a specifically Hungarian accent but perhaps that was the point. As a showpiece giving every section of the orchestra its place in the sun, it served here to demonstrate the growing confidence and stylishness of the RPO in every department. The central Elegy plumbed considerable depths but the fourth was particularly effective with laugh-out-loud trombone and a perhaps unsuspected emotional range. Bartók may or may not have been lampooning Shostakovich. The most unconventional aspect of the performance was the way it proceeded in one breath without pausing between movements. Hard to say whether this was done to block unwelcome applause or to enhance the propulsive flow of the music. The partial standing ovation at the close was the second of the night.
The post RPO Lights in the Dark – Korngold, Rachmaninov and Bartok appeared first on The Classical Source.
