RTE devotes a lunchtime concert a week over the summer months to the lighter end of the orchestral repertoire. So the continuation of that style of programming into the Friday evenings of September, which used to service the National Symphony Orchestra's core activity - its subscription series - must surely be counted a retrograde step.
The current series of "Golden Jubilee Favourites" includes a proportion of audience choices, though these are not identified in the programmes, nor is the relative demand for the various items included. The dangers of the approach, and in particular the perils of performing single movements out of context, were made clear in the programme conducted last night by the NSO's new principal conductor, Alexander Aniss imov.
The concert opened with a most pleasurably buoyant and unrushed account of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro Overture, with a large body of strings proving no impediment to a beautifully-sustained lightness of step. It was unwise, however, to follow with a slacklymoving reading of the slow movement from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and then a drowsily-protracted if sometimes gorgeously-toned reading of the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth.
The orchestra's principal horn player, Lesley Bishop, lacked the soloistic edge of presence to make her performance of Mozart's Fourth Horn Concerto more than businesslike. And, after the interval, in Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'une faune, Aniss imov didn't capture the radiance to capitalise on his achievements of colour and seemed to restrain the music's natural inclination to surge.
With the "Dance of the Hours" from Ponchielli's La Gioconda the audience was transported into a different world, where all the elements gelled, no felicity of orchestral detail went unnoticed, and nothing in the deftness of the music-making impeded a grander expansiveness where it was called for. It was a real treat to hear such a delicate bon-bon handled with affectionate care, and the audience registered its appreciation with especial enthusiasm.
Borodin's Polovtsian Dances and the "Waltz of the Flowers" from Tchaikovsky's Nut- cracker were both delivered with easy directness, maintaining a well-set, pre-ordained course, yet yielding nothing in expressiveness to approaches of more overtly interventionist gesture. It seems to be a Russian gift that Anissimov has in good measure to find in the music of his native land a path that is simple and true yet deeply rewarding.
As a bonus at the end of an already long evening, the audience was rewarded with an encore, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, in which Anissimov avoided the conventional ploys that pull at the heart strings in favour of a much-appreciated musicianly directness.
