Wallop - Stephen Gardner
Piano Concerto No 4 - Beethoven
Symphony No 5 - Shostakovich
On Thursday, in advance of its weekend appearance at one of the world's great concert halls, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, the National Symphony Orchestra gave its final NCH concert with Kasper de Roo as principal conductor.
The Dutch conductor's four years at RTE will not be recorded as a distinguished period in the orchestra's history. Just think of the curtailment of the subscription season (his duties at Innsbruck taking precedence in September, RTE's lack of imagination nibbling at the summer months), the continued hit-and-miss programming, and the ongoing week-to-week variability (both musical and technical) of the performances.
But is has been a period of greater overall stability, aided by the strong presence of principal guest conductor Alexander Anissimov, who takes over as principal conductor from September. And, although many problems remain, the orchestra is clearly now of higher potential than it was in 1994.
The music of our own time has generally brought out the best in the Dutchman's conducting, so it seemed appropriate for the final concert of his term to open with a work by a living Irish composer. Stephen Gardner's Wallop makes extended play of a four-note motif, setting up patterns of rhythm and density mostly within homogeneous subgroups of the percussion-less orchestra. The piece has a likeable directness in a post-minimalist way, but felt in this performance as if it needed tightening up to yield the full rewards of its overall strategy.
Hugh Tinney's veiled opening to Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto set just the right tone for a performance that would balance intimacy and brilliance with poetic flexibility of phrasing. The conductor, however, had other ideas, bringing the orchestra in far too loudly, and the leader, Alan Smale, seemed determined to have the first violins stand out of rather than blend into many of the accompanying textures. The abundance of sour notes in the upper treble of the piano (a frequent problem with the Steinways at the NCH) made for a further barrier to enjoyment, but Tinney's visionary delivery proved secure enough to transcend all the obstacles that were placed in its way.
Shostakovich has been one of the featured composers of de Roo's term here, and the Fifth Symphony provided reminders of the now familiar performing style - recurrent infelicities of ensemble, difficulties in avoiding slackness at slower tempos (here, quite pronounced in the first movement), resilient success in more thrusting passages (the second), and an open-armed willingness to give the climactic moments their head.
