Lieutenant Kije: Symphonic Suite, Op. 60 - Prokofiev

Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40 - Rachmaninov

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 - Tchaikovsky

Friday night's all-Russian programme under Anissimov, with Hugh Tinney as soloist in Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 4, filled the NCH with an enthusiastic audience. The first work, Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije, was given a most attractive reading. The ensemble was particularly crisp and each colourful detail received due emphasis so that the whole added up to make a lighthearted Russian fairy tale minus the witches. This was light music at its best.

Rachmaninov's Concerto No. 4 can disappoint devotees of numbers 1 to 3. In it, the composer seems to be striving for new and more subtle means of expression. The big tunes and big climaxes are there, but the moments of confident bravura are short and they sometimes falter, giving way to a nervous hesitancy. Hugh Tinney's approach was probing and analytical, bringing out the intellectual side of the work. Anissimov got an alert and sensitive response from the NSO in the quiet passages and plenty of romantic ardour in the climaxes, but it seemed to me that soloist and conductor were not totally of one mind.

Direction was not lacking in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4. The conductor was at times a marvel of calm, at times possessed by a demonic spirit. He gave the impression of having unleashed an untamed force, which he encouraged to surge forward with all the energy he could muster. Delicately phrased passages of pastoral calm were followed by increasingly bombastic declarations of the full orchestra's power, ending in an apotheosis of blazing sound.