Rebus - Markevitch
Violin Concerto - Brahms
Mathis der Mahler Symphony - Hindemith
IGOR Markevitch (1912-83) was well-known as a conductor, and his career remains well documented on disc in the age of the CD. In his youth, however, the picture was different. Then he was known as a composer, the last great discovery of Diaghilev, praised by the likes of Bartok and Milhaud. But he stopped composing before he was 30 and for most of his life seems to have shrugged off the importance of his early creations.
The music he produced at the age of 19 for Rebus (a never-realised ballet project commissioned by Massine) shows an individual cast of mind allied to a taste for the motoric, very much of the mood of urban and industrial-tinged music of the 1920s. The score is not without its moments of gaucherie (most notably the crudely-manoeuvred C major close), but some of these are undoubtedly intended within a mechanistic aesthetic. The best moments are really fine, particularly the propulsive multi-layered rhythmic activity of the fourth movement, which builds up a real head of steam.
Friday's not quite settled performance by the NSO under Gerhard Markson (who studied conducting under Markevitch) seemed to shy away from the harsher aspects of the score.
There was nothing shy in young German violinist KohGabriel Kameda's tonally-forward and rhythmically-precipitous performance of the Brahms concerto. I don't think I've heard at the NCH a performance of this work which brought it closer to the world of a Wieniawski showpiece.
Conductor and orchestra reserved their best-polished work for the closing Hindemith, downplaying the contrapuntal intricacies of the writing in favour of tonal effulgence in these symphonic extracts from an opera which encapsulates the composer's response to the Nazis' rise to power.
