Symphony No 10 - Beethoven/Cooper
Piano Concerto No 1 - Beethoven
Das Rheingold (exc) - Wagner
New hands at the helm or no, RTE's music division is capable of making misguided decisions. For the month of January the RTE-managed National Symphony Orchestra is going to continue its reversion to a practice that had its heyday in the century before last, that of concert performances of what are commonly known as "bleeding chunks" of Wagner.
Last Friday's instalment, the first of four from the Ring cycle, was a musically miserable affair, a voice-less selection from Das Rheingold. The whole was as undramatic as you could imagine (the offstage "anvils" sometimes sounded like a curious clatter of tuned castanets), and rising only to momentary flickers of excitement at climactic moments. For anyone trying to make sense of the history of music from the concert life of Dublin (rather than through CDs or radio) the scarcity of Wagner would be one of the greatest obstacles. In these circumstances, concert performances of his operas would be a welcome contribution. Contextless excerpts in performances full of solecisms are not.
The NSO's playing sounded frequently uncomfortable in the - locally - untrodden terrain of Wagner, as it did in the even-less-well-explored movement which musicologist Barry Cooper has extrapolated from sketches believed to have been made for Beethoven's Tenth Symphony. Whatever the merits of Cooper's undertaking - which seem to me to be more academic than musical - a performance as tentative as that offered by Anissimov did little to further the cause.
In Beethoven's First Piano Concerto, Anissimov adopted a rather breezier approach, which, in spite of lots of blurred semi-quaver runs and an abundance of rough chording, was rather better supported by the music. The soloist, John O'Conor, was in no-nonsense form, playing with a sureness and sculpted consistency of style that made the work sound far from its usual genial self. In the first movement, he played the longest of Beethoven's three cadenzas, an often gritty and heavyweight undertaking. On Friday it came almost to seem the centrepiece of the work, spreading its influence far beyond its immediate surroundings.
