{TABLE} Italian Girl in Algiers Overture ......... Rossini Violin Concerto in A, K219 ............... Mozart Symphony No 15 ........................... Shostakovich {/TABLE} ONE of the finest hours of Kasper de Roo's term as principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra was provided earlier this year in Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony. The Fifteenth Symphony, the latest instalment in the orchestra's ongoing Shostakovich series, unfortunately found the conductor in less persuasive form at the NCH on Friday.
Shostakovich's Fifteenth is comic, grotesque, allusive. Its quotations of Rossini and Wagner are a feature yet to be convincingly explained. The music itself does not sustain these intrusions with anything approaching plausibility.
And the work has about it an undeniable undertone of send up. Quite what - or who - the composer might have had in mind as target is, however, hard to say.
De Roo opted to tackle the music head on. You could call his approach dutiful (it was not accurate enough in dynamics, ensemble or intonation to be literal) and in a work of such patent elusiveness the effect was drudgingly, doggedly leaden - in spite of the lightness of much of the material.
The soloist in Mozart's A major Violin Concerto was the young Canadian, Corey Cerovsek. This player, still in his early twenties, has an impressive list of achievements to his credit. He graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music at Toronto University at 12, following this up with studies under Josef Gingold at Indiana (taking bachelor's degrees in both music and mathematics at 15, master's at 16, completing his doctorate at 18).
You would be right to infer from all of this that he can get around the fiddle with enviable ease. And yet, this may be something of a problem for him in the music of Mozart, where fiddler's ease becomes a disease when it involves quite so much uncalled for tampering with bowing and articulation. Cerovsek seemed altogether better attuned to the little bon bon by Kreisler, which he threw in as an encore, the choice of which also seemed to provide a useful guide to his sense of musical values.
This musically disappointing concert opened with an altogether too strait laced account of Rossini's delightful Italian Girl in Algiers Overture.
