Piano Concerto in C minor K491 - Mozart
Symphony No 1 - Mozart
For the second Mahler offering of its current season, the National Symphony Orchestra roved backwards from the Second Symphony to the First.
Principal conductor Kasper de Roo's approach was not at all as overtly affectionate here as that of Franz-Paul Decker, under whom I last heard the orchestra play the piece three years ago.
But, if the touches of chilliness of the conductor's style did stretch out the perception of time in the outer movements - the first with its prolonged opening pedal point, the finale which can so easily seem to meander after the convulsive shock which launches it - the genial tread of the second and the parodistic funeral march of the third were finely done.
De Roo does not seem concerned to deliver all those fine nuances of dynamic shading that Mahler so agonised over and something of the raw thrill of the composer's unfailingly resourceful orchestral imagination is lost by this oversight. But the First is among the most frequently-performed of Mahler's symphonies in Dublin, and the players' familiarity guaranteed a performance of greater security and polish than was offered last month in the Second.
The concert opened with the second of Mozart's two minor key piano concertos, the one in C minor, K491.
There is a tendency to view the piece in performance from a later, Beethovenian perspective, and on this occasion the style of the orchestral music-making, thrustingly brusque, yielded consistently to this temptation.
On the other hand, the soloist, Greek pianist Janis Vakarelis, spoke with the gentlest of voices.
He favoured a rounded tone of especial beauty, and conveyed the full expressive weight of the music through playing of fine proportion to achieve a memorable eloquence of understatement.
