A glance at this, the last concert of the present series, was enough to set the heart racing, featuring as it did two Scandinavian works conducted by the Philharmonia‘s Finnish chief conductor who is one of the best of the present day interpreters of the Nordic repertoire, with in addition the concerto slot having one of today’s very best pianists playing one of Beethoven’s greatest works , the Fifth Piano Concerto. What could possibly go wrong, one thought.
However, I was aware that this concert was designated the Lord Mayor’s concert, at which as usual the incumbent for the year was expected to deliver a speech. Now, of course, being made Lord Mayor for twelve months is the reward for many years of worthy public service and not for the ability to speak in public. The two quite often do not go together, a fact which was brought home to me in my first year of teaching in Rochester in the early 1960s when with my future brother-in-law I was given the tricky task of controlling the fifth form during the speech day, that year held in Chatham Town Hall. We were soon more than apprehensive when the principal speaker, the then leader of the Kent County Council, meandered on and on recalling all the great orators he had heard, starting with Lloyd George and proving to an increasingly restive school boy audience that he had, alas, learnt very little from his experiences. However, everything comes to an end and the two of us were just congratulating ourselves on having kept a lid on things when he stood up again and, these are his exact words, asked the hall to stand up whilst ‘the stage party pass out’! Needless to say, we had no hope of containing the tsunami of laughter that swept through the hall.
Now, nothing like that has happened in my experience of speech making in the De Montfort Hall. Leicester folk are nothing like as revolutionary as a body of Kent adolescents of the 1960s but it has been quite common to feel a general wish that the speechifying would stop and the music begin. That this year that feeling was absent was a tribute to this year’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Susan Barton. She spoke of the debt that we owe the Philharmonia for the way they have embedded themselves in city life, how widely the orchestra has made itself felt not just in the concert hall but in schools and in universities as well in many worthwhile projects besides what is, of course , the basic reason for their presence in the city, an annual feast of music- making not to be surpassed in quality in my experience with anything else in the great wide world of music. To judge from the vigorous applause that followed, the audience, besides endorsing that, also registered their thanks in times of outrageous financial squeezing of local government by central government that our city continues to see the arts as central to the community and to hear someone say in this context how this great orchestra’s presence in the city is so mightily appreciated. The speaker deserved the hearty applause she received from both orchestra and audience.
It was therefore apt the concert began with Nielsen’s glorious evocation in his Helios Overture of the glory of the Sun God as he traverses the sky from dawn to dusk. The orchestra thoroughly blazed at the great climaxes in the centre of this work displaying the light and heat of its zenith. The brass had a field day, if there is a woodwind section that surpasses the Philharmonia’s, well I haven’t heard it and as for the strings… well worldwide to judge from reviews read it would seem that what was in my youth the Achilles heel of many an orchestra is no longer so. The wonder is that the Philharmonia’s strings have maintained a distinctive quality, that clarity and virtuosity come also with warmth. They are simply wonderful in adapting to the sound world of the work they are playing.
There followed a performance of Beethoven’s last piano concerto which decisively questioned the title by which it is commonly recognised. It was interesting that the programme asked whether The Emperor really did justice to the revolutionary quality of much of the music. The other idea that it referred to Napoleon is even more questionable since well before its composition the composer had written off Bonaparte when he gave himself royalty. Whatever, I found this a searching performance indeed. This was the first time that I have heard Steven Osborne live and, my goodness, what a virtuoso he can be but with the most delicate of touches at times as well. The individuality of the interpretation was perhaps compounded by his playing the Hall’s piano, the Fazioli. It took a little time for this listener once again to adapt to a sound so unlike the much more frequent choice of a Steinway for this concerto. However, very quickly the ear did adapt once again to the often beautiful and rather wonderful bell like clarity of the instrument even in the bass. With an orchestral accompaniment which was in the outer movements not afraid to be hugely exciting, in other words Romantic, and was beautifully delicate in the middle movement, by the finish I felt I had heard an interpretation which really made one re-think the essence of the work and that it was no bad thing for old and loved warhorses to undergo an occasional shake. I am not, though, advocating a bonfire of Steinways!
And so we came to the final work of the season, Sibelius’ great Symphony No.5 with an orchestra which has played the composer’s work under some of the best conductors of this repertoire, particularly so in recent years. The latest in that line is their present chief conductor Santttu-Matias Rouvali who on this evening convinced this listener that he had never heard a better interpretation. Time and again you sensed what is vital in this composer’s symphonic music, the sense of there being an overarching grand structure with at almost the same time a certain mystery as to where the journey is going. Proof of the wonderful control of this performance was illustrated to me in a surprising manner. I was accompanied to this concert by some friends who had never heard this symphony before nor I think would two of them even suggest that they had much knowledge of classical music generally. Yet, after the concert one of them said how fascinating it was to hear music that gave a sense of something deep going on and yet was utterly mysterious as to where it was going, only then to suddenly reveal in several great dramatic moments what it had been journeying towards all along.
And what drama there was in this performance. The strings in particular in the great apotheosis of the last movement played with an intensity that almost suggested that flames were about to appear, but then every moment of the performance offered some breathtaking felicity and was a wonderful ending to the season. Hope to see you all in October and onwards in the new season.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 