Leszek Bialy Overture - Elsner
Piano Concerto No 2 - Chopin
Mazeppa - Liszt
Symphony No 3 (Rhenish).... Schumann
LAST NIGHT'S National Symphony Orchestra programme under the Polish conductor Antoni Wit at the NCH was the first of two featuring the music of Chopin, who died 150 years ago.
The concert opened with an overture by Chopin's teacher, Jozef Elsner, a prolific composer of opera in the early 19th century. Whatever the effect of his music in the opera house, the overture to Leszek Bialy sounds curiously patchy in the concert hall. To make an analogy with clothes, it's as if a suit has been made from excellent material, but the cut is simply not right. Elsner can generate the ideas and finish the surfaces, but he just can't assemble things in a fully convincing way.
Cristina Ortiz was a perfectly capable soloist in the concerto, and Antoni Wit did everything one could wish for with Chopin's much-maligned orchestral writing. But Ortiz simply didn't show the sort of micro-inflectional sensitivity which is needed to bring this music fully to life.
Wit took a steady-as-she-goes approach in Mazeppa, in what Seemed to be an attempt to bring a sheen of civility to a work which needs to be raw and exciting. Liszt's piano original, one of the Transcendental Studies, on which the symphonic poem is based, gets its excitement from the sheer difficulty of the keyboard writing. Wit's sedateness robbed the piece of a an essential edgy thrill, but did have the advantage of showing the originality of much of the scoring in a very flattering light.
RTE's planners have taken against Schumann's symphonies for quite a while now - I can only trace three performances in the last 12 years - so having the Rhenish resurface in an affectionately solid reading is almost like meeting a long-lost old friend. It was the outer movements in this performance which sounded most persuasive, persuasive enough for one to want to spend rather more time in the company of a composer who doesn't deserve the neglect that's been forced on him.
