John Finucane (clarinet), NSO/Alexander Anissimov

Symphony No 8 - Beethoven

Clarinet Concerto - James Wilson

Gotterdammerung (exc) - Wagner

You don't have to spend long watching Alexander Anissimov on the podium to divine from the swirl and thrust of his gestures that theatricality is something on which he places a high value.

Gotterdammerung at the NCH on Friday provided him with a better platform than anything earlier on in his potted series from Wagner's mammoth music drama. Here, at last, were moments of true dramatic bite, passages that surged with a real sense of latent power.

The execution, admittedly, was rough, but the spirit of Wagner somehow shone through with consistency. Before the interval there had been a slugglishly overweight reading of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, the upbeat character of the piece completely masked in a performance where vitality of projection and clarity of argument were sadly missing.

John Finucane was the generally spry soloist in James Wilson's new Clarinet Concerto. This is a work in the composer's lighter mode, mercurially contrasting passages of chirrupy agility with moments of slower cantilena. Wilson declares the piece to have been much influenced by a number of painters (Mondrian, Mortensen, Ernst). This may explain the almost fickle variability in the character of the writing. The music only really seemed to come into focus as the composer set his mind to the winding up of each of the concerto's three movements.