Piano Concerto in D K175 - Mozart
Piano Concerto in F K413 - Mozart
Piano Concerto in B flat K595 - Mozart
Hugh Tinney's three-year odyssey through the complete piano concertos of Mozart with the Orchestra of St Cecilia under Geoffrey Spratt reached its end at the NCH last night. In a gesture of summation, the programme offered three concertos, the first, the last and, in between, one from the composer's late twenties.
The playing, too, could be seen as summing up various characteristics of the series which, although received with rapture by the audience at its conclusion, has been - and I say this as a long-time admirer of Tinney's musicianship - an uneven achievement.
The poise and nobility of bearing promised by the earliest concerts was again abandoned in the faster movements of the first two concertos of the closing programme. Here Tinney, playing from the music, offered phrasing that was frequently spiky, and highly-drilled playing that did not avoid moments of snatchiness.
Following the pattern of the series as a whole, the best moments were to be found in the slow movements, and the balances between soloist and orchestra (often problematic in these concerts) were reasonably gauged.
After the interval, the orchestral playing got rougher, and Spratt's handling of the glorious opening movement of K595 could hardly be described as other than pedestrian.
Contrariwise Tinney, playing from memory, revealed himself in altogether more imaginative form, the predictable angularities of the first half abandoned in favour of finely-considered shaping and colours of muted lustre.
Happily, Spratt and the orchestra settled in the Larghetto,where their musical support, with a tone of fine-spun delicacy, conjured an atmosphere of balanced chamber-music interplay in what was one of the most magically-realised movements of the series as a whole.
This was an achievement which suggested that Tinney could have far more to offer in these works than he managed to reveal consistently in this, his first marathon of this kind.
