{TABLE} Piano Concerto in A, K488 ...................... Mozart Symphony No 3 ................................... Bruckner {/TABLE} THE National Symphony orchestra's NCH programme last night was to have opened with the premiere of Ian Wilson's new organ concerto, Rich Harbour. The indisposition of the soloist, Peter Sweeney, however, caused its postponement (it will be heard in June) and the first half of the concert was given over to a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto in A, K488, by Rachel Quinn.
It was not the happiest of performances. Perhaps the business of having to play a concerto at short notice was something the young player found unnerving, for, although she took the precaution of playing from the music, a sense of security was not one of the characteristics of this performance. Arbitrary phrase shaping and loose rhythmic control predominated, to create a feeling that the performer was simply out of her depth in such exacting repertoire.
Bruckner's Third Symphony exists in more versions than any other, ranging in length from the 2,056 bars of the first version of 1873 (which is longer than any other Bruckner symphony) to the 1,644 of the revision of 1889. There is a purist argument against the 1889 version (that it mixes together traits of the early and mature Bruckner), but it is the version which has gained widest currency and which was performed by the NSO, under Kasper de Roo, last night.
De Roo again showed little innate sympathy for Bruckner's music, encouraging climaxes that seemed to treat the bass trombone as a solo instrument, and often causing the fracture of melodic lines (which at times appeared to be stabbed at rather than sung through). It was almost as if he felt that the whipped up insistence he brought to Shostakovich's Twelfth Symphony a few weeks ago should serve every bit as well in the entirely different world of Bruckner.
