NCH, Dublin

Prokofiev – The Love for Three Oranges Suite Glazunov – Violin Concerto

Rimsky-Korsakov – Sheherazade

Prokofiev's opera The Love for Three Orangesand Glazunov's Violin Concerto are separated by a mere 15 years. But those years were among the most musically turbulent of the 20th century. Glazunov completed the concerto in 1904, but the music is still romantically attached to the 19th century. A few years later the teenage Prokofiev, who delighted in motoric writing and grotesque dissonances, was taken up by a St Petersburg circle that had promoted the likes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Alan Buribayev's approach to The Love for Three OrangesSuite was to highlight its brazen modernity and angularity. He brightened colours to make their clashes even more striking, stirred up storms of noise, and chose to sideline the lyricism that co-exists with the garishly fantastical.

The normally impressive Ilya Gringolts sounded off-form in the Glazunov, the tone not large enough to be heart-warming, the delivery not as sure as his previous performances would have led one to expect. He seemed to get almost into his stride in the finale, although even here the playing tended to be on the rough side of robust.

There were passages in Buribayev's handling of Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazadewhere the oriental fantasy of the narrative became more overbearing than alluring. This had to do with the unbuttoned playing of the low, heavy brass, and the percussion section, whose players do not yet respond to the new principal conductor with the subtlety of most of the rest of the orchestra. There's a real want of nobility from the one, and an excess of kish-boom from the other.

Where Buribayev’s approach is currently most telling is in the playing of the strings, where he is encouraging a quality of tone that’s at once fuller and more refined, and also highly malleable. That malleability was put to good use in the tempo he brought to Sheherazade, allowing the music’s recursiveness to sound always fresh, the material showing new angles and tensions. And many solos were finely done, with principal clarinettist John Finucane’s sense of spontaneity taking the peach.

- MD