Kennedy comeback finishes a little early

{TABLE} Introduction to Khovansh-china....................Mussorgsky Violin Concerto...................................Elgar Rite of Spring....................................Stravinsky {/TABLE} IMAGINE, if you will, you're at the theatre. The play has reached a scene of quiet introspection. Someone in the audience decides it's actually over, claps... and, what's this, the management bring up the house lights while the actors are still speaking?

Of course, it didn't happen at a play (we take our theatre too seriously for that) but a the Bank of Ireland RTE Proms last night, during Nigel Kennedy's comeback performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto with the NSO under its principal guest conductor-elect, Gerhard Markson.

Yes. While Kennedy was still playing not in the final chord or bar, but a couple of minutes from the end - some premature clapping caused the houselights to be brought up, encouraging even more applause, to the obvious discomfiture of the performer.

Kennedy, who arrived on stage with his usual ebullience, decided to try out the RDS Main Hall's electronically generated church-echo acoustic before the concerto, a procedure which turned out to be both useful to his performance and pleasurable for the audience.

There was enough intimacy in his reading of the Elgar to fox the amplification - there was not the full sense of presence that the volume of amplified sound seemed to promise, nor was there the precision of tonal character or scale to draw the listener successfully into what the pre-amplified performance might actually have had to offer. It was a frustrating experience, which, I suspect, might well have been a hugely enjoyable one in a more appropriate acoustic setting.

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring came at the listener rough and ready, with much of the end result being defined by the difficulties of co-ordination presented by the venue and the often topsy-turvy balances produced by the amplification.

The most successful item in the programme was the Mussorgsky, which at least served the purpose of reminding one of how unjustly neglected the composer's work is, apart from the ubiquitous Ravel orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition.