{TABLE} Violin Concerto ......... Berg Symphony No 4 ........... Mahler {/TABLE} D ERG dedicated his Violin Concerto "to the memory of an angel". The angel in question was the 18 year old polio victim, Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler by her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius. The concerto proved to be the composer's last completed work, a requiem for himself as well as a requiem for Manon.
August in Dumay's performance with the National Symphony Orchestra under Kasper de Roo was full and luscious of tone, more celebratory than elegiac. The larger than life effect of his playing was intensified by the conductor's handling of the orchestra, which strove to be largely unintrusive. The gains were in the easy prominence of the solo violin part, the losses in the lack of necessary musical engagement between soloist and orchestra.
The sense of orchestral understatement persisted in the second half, when Mahler's Fourth Symphony was given a brisk and, in spite of an agreeably genial opening, ultimately rather chilly reading. The soprano soloist in the fourth movement's child's view of heaven was Lynda Russell, well up to the vocal demands of the part, but unheeding of Mahler's insistence on the avoidance of any sense of parody.
