Collins, RTÉ NSO/Lintu

NCH, Dublin ***

Andrew Hamilton:

the true truths.

Mozart:Piano Concerto No 24 in C minor K491. Brahms: Symphony No 4

Here’s a fundamental question: can your national symphony orchestra live up to its public and artistic responsibilities and deliver when it dusts off and performs a mainstream masterpiece? Under principal guest conductor Hannu Lintu, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra delivered. The piece was the Symphony No 4 by Brahms. Really delivering means more than just playing “an old warhorse” (a hateful expression). If all that were required were correct notes, dynamics and tempos, then the whole enterprise would have been computerised long ago.

Lintu did what computers can’t do and what symphony orchestras can’t do by themselves. He brought the score to life, inhabited it, explored it, illuminated it. Was it the ideal Brahms 4? No, there’s no such thing. But it was formidably, compellingly valid. It was proper art, powerful, stirring you up and moving you. You sat there thinking, yes, this is why I love Brahms.

Pages before the fourth movement’s beautiful flute solo – beautifully played – Lintu had prepared the space it would go into. Elsewhere he held back, he let go. He secured a fine balance between bite and warmth in the brass, and drew out something oaken and rich from the strings.

In both the Brahms and in Mozart’s often Beethovenesque C minor Piano Concerto, the programme offered two works that offered the occasional prominent spotlight on the woodwinds with the rest of the orchestra silent. The NSO winds took these moments with grace and freshness, nicely complementing the stylish performance negotiated by Lintu and soloist Finghin Collins.

The concert opened with the premiere of the RTÉ commission the true truths by emerging Dublin-born composer Andrew Hamilton. The title is borrowed from Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser, and the composer quotes Nietzsche and Ajahn Chah, a Thai monk, in the printed programme.

The eight-minute piece is minuet-like in character and structure, with a quiet central section bookended by longer sections driven by a light-hearted ostinato passed rapidly between the orchestral families. This was slightly odd on its own – it might sit well between movements in a symphony.