The fourth concert of the season brought to DMH in terms of artists a familiar combination of the known and the new. For the violin soloist Esther Yoo it was her third visit over a number of years and it was fascinating to look back and compare the present with the past. No such opportunity presented itself in regard the conductor Emelia Hoving, however, since this was her debut in Leicester. Yet one in a sense guessed that something was afoot as the programme placed her as a product of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, from which has come some of the most exciting new conductors of this century. Add to that the fact that over the years it has been obvious that you don’t get to conduct the Philharmonia unless you have something rather special to offer and it was not surprising that expectations were high.
And those expectations were rapidly fulfilled in a powerful performance of the final movement of Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Legends, entitled Lemminkäinen’s Return. It appears that it was not surprisingly something of a triumphant return since his Mum had sown her lad’s dismembered body together again and had thus brought him back to life. What it most certainly did do was to fire the composer’s defiant nationalistic feelings to produce music that was as dramatic a 7 minutes of music as one could have wished for as an opening to a concert, particularly in its relevance to what is going in the Ukraine in our own day.
And so on to the concerto slot, this time filled by Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No1. It received a fine performance. In Esther Yoo’s last visit I warmed to aspects of her interpretation of the Tchaikovsky, particularly those passages which called for beauty of tone but felt that at times the virtuoso parts could have done with rather more heft. Here that rarely seemed wanting. She seems to be now the complete player. Of course, this concerto is very different, making virtuoso demands which more equate with quicksilver rather than demanding weight. It also has much that is characteristic of the composer’s wonderful lyrical gifts and these produced playing of great beauty from both soloist and orchestra. In the end, though, I felt that, though there was much in the concerto that looked forward to the mature composer, the sum of its parts was not always that convincing. It reminded me at times of that wonderful line from Monty Python, ‘And now for something different.’
Well, the audience certainly got that in the post interval performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Let me say at once that I have had a long standing thing about this composer when faced by the condescension which this music has drawn at times from some eminent musicologists and other superior beings. Sometimes it was worse than condescension. I remember a friend who for many years ran a record shop which drew me to browse every Saturday morning telling me of an encounter with a customer who had come into his shop. Said customer asked him to put together some music which would act as an introduction for his son to classical music. However, he stipulated that in the collection there was to be no Tchaikovsky nor Puccini. Apparently, he thought their music dangerously depraved! Some years later The Leicester Music Society welcomed John Steane, the eminent contributor to the Gramophone on opera, to give a talk on the latter which he started thus, ‘ You may be interested to learn that not so many years ago a very eminent Cambridge Professor of Music declared Puccini’s music to be evil.’
Now, I would not have dredged up these memories had not the evening’s programme notes by David Nice drawn attention to the condescension which the composer faced in the period that saw the composing of this symphony, during which a Hamburg critic seemingly suggested that the composer should come to live in Germany where, wrote the composer, ‘’ classical traditions and conditions of the highest culture would certainly free me from my shortcomings’’.
What all this did achieve was give me the very greatest satisfaction to hear a great orchestra under a young conductor in as fervent a performance as I have heard of one of the greatest symphonies ever written. The playing of all sections of the orchestra I thought by turn stunning, by turn beautiful. Even the first horn managed his terrifyingly exposed part at the beginning of the Andante with hardly a stumble, the brass had enormous depth, the wind section was its aristocratic self with mouthwatering effect and the strings were incandescent in the great moments of the symphony.
And I have yet to mention the conductor! Well, of one thing I think I can be sure. None of what I heard in the last instance could surely have occurred without a direction and encouragement that comes from fine conducting and a clear grasp of the music. It is true that conducting is a mysterious art. I have heard conductors like Furtwangler and Klemperer who, despite having no sort of clear beat, produced magic whilst others, despite appearing to be clarity itself, created stubbornly earthbound results. What I would say here is that Emilia Hoving seemed utterly in control, that her left hand appeared often expressive instead of simply keeping time with the stick and that this performance had me looking forward very much to seeing her on the rostrum again.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 