{TABLE} Wallop ......................... Stephen Gardner Piano Concerto in C K503 ....... Mozart Symphony No 5 .................. Shostakovitch {/TABLE} THE National Symphony Orchestra's concert at the National Concert Hall on Friday night opened with Wallop by Belfast born Stephen Gardner. This was a second performance; the first was given last autumn by the Ulster Orchestra. In Friday's performance at least, Wallop came across as a piece rather more serious than was suggested either by its occasional fripperies, or by the composer's frivolous programme note. It sets the strings, brass and woodwind in competition, via dense block harmonies and sharp edged rhythms.
The 24 year old Austrian, Till Fellner, was the soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto in C K503. Conductor Kasper de Roo and the NSO played the orchestral part with precision and responsiveness. In the opening ritornello and for the first moments of Fellner's entry - superb in tone and impeccable in technique - I thought this was set to be an elegant yet standard performance. It was not, for under Fellner's urbane, aristocratic bearing there lurks a musical lion. The strength with which he explored the more subtle reaches of Mozart's part-writing, and his superb rhythmic sense kept one on tip toe.
Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5 never quite delivered the impact promised by the NSO's shapely, well balanced and often powerful playing. Kasper de Roo's attention to detail and, in particular, his tendency to subdivide a slow pulse had a fragmenting effect on large scale shape, especially on Shostakovitch's enormously sweeping melodies.
