Symphony No 31 (Horn Signal) - Haydn
Violin Concerto - Korngold
Pictures at an Exhibition - Mussorgsky/Ravel
If you were to draw up a list of composers based on how they fare at the hands of the National Symphony Orchestra, Haydn would be down near the bottom. Three cheers, then, for Gerhard Markson, the orchestra's principal conductor-designate (and current principal guest conductor), who's begun paying attention to Haydn even before his term starts in just over 12 months' time.
The welcome for the actual performance of the Horn Signal Symphony, with its unusual complement of four horns, has to be qualified. The best of the many solos in this work came from Eckart Schwarz Schulz on cello (sadly, not from the horns); and the first-violin dominance to which the orchestra is prone found solo wind lines in the variations of the finale being obscured by the strings at the front. Yet there was also a sense of brio to the performance which ensured that the insuppressible spirit of Haydn jostled with the inexcusable in the playing.
There's a lot that needs excusing in the 1945 Violin Concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a man who helped define the essential schmaltziness of the mid-20th-century Hollywood film score. He borrowed from a number of his film scores in the creation of his Violin Concerto, a work memorably panned by the New York Sun as "more corn than gold". It's a work written for people with such a sweet tooth that they like icing and syrup on everything. And that's just what Ernst Kovacic offered in an impassioned, pleading account of what must surely be the most successful of bad-taste concertos.
The standard way for conductors to approach Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is as a gaudy orchestral showpiece, no matter how this misrepresents both composers' parts in the project. Mark son's reading was in the familiar mould, and full of heavy fingerprinting. There was no shortage of innovative ideas, volume or excitement. But there was a lot of pulling about (so many tempos in "Tuileries" that there was really none at all) and an abundance of ill-disciplined playing.
"Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle", a picture of two Jews, was the first to come clearly into persuasive focus, with an impressive gravitas in the weighty opening. But "Catacombs" was downright ugly, and thereafter there were too many excursions into that sort of blatant noisiness that can thrill an audience however scant its musical justification.
