NCH, Dublin Bach/Stokowski – Fugue in G minor BWV578. Khachaturian – Violin Concerto. Tchaikovsky – Symphony No 6 (Pathétique).
The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra has been engaged in a range of innovations recently. September brought the first of a number of programmes featuring a “surprise extra” billed as a “Wild Card”.
I experienced the new idea for the first time on Friday, when it left me completely nonplussed. Not the music itself, just the business of having one of the evening’s pieces kept secret until the event.
A programme like Friday’s, of just a concerto and a symphony, usually looks like it is in need of an opener. The “Wild Card” filled a slot that would have had to be filled anyway. It filled it with some organ music by Bach – the Little Fugue in G minor – gloried up for orchestra by Leopold Stokowski.
In conductor Matthias Bamert it had an interpreter who served as Stokowski’s assistant in the 1970s and who showed no fear in building towards the exaggerated climax. The mystery was this: why not let people know in advance that such a juicy morsel was going to open the evening?
Aram Khachaturian’s 1940 Violin Concerto is one of the most folksily tuneful concertos in the 20th-century repertoire. But the soloist, the NSO’s co-leader, Elaine Clark, took the music rather too often at face value.
Her forthright playing did little to counteract the music’s garrulous repetitiveness, so that, for all the moment-by-moment appeal of Clark’s approach, one was all too aware of how the same ideas were coming around again and again.
Continuing a valuable innovation from last year, the orchestra included eight young players from the RTÉ NSO mentoring scheme.
Bamert allowed the brass in Tchaikovksy's PathétiqueSymphony to trespass into excess in the first movement. But the second was suave, the third nimble, and the pathos of the finale persuasive.
