Fialkowska, RTÉ NSO/ Markson

NCH, Dublin

Beethoven – Fidelio Overture.

Mozart – Piano Concerto in C minor K491. Brahms – Symphony No 2.

Some of the players in the horn section of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra were prominently having an off night in this concert’s Fidelio Overture by Beethoven. There’s truly nowhere for horn players to hide in this high-spirited undertaking. Happily, however, their playing settled as the evening wore on, and the music-making in general followed a similar pattern of settling over time.

Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska was the tonally refined soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K491. The orchestral playing under Gerhard Markson went for altogether burlier effects than the soloist, who seemed to be aiming for a kind of classical balance that could accommodate moments of impetuosity, as well as a style of cadenza that introduced moments of decidedly non-18th-century flavour into the music. Fialkowska’s always beautiful-sounding approach did in the end, however, seem rather too cool for this most probing of Mozart concertos.

Markson is a heavyweight Germanic Brahmsian. And why not? He’s a musically heavyweight German after all. Well, one good reason would be the tendency in his conducting for opacity to increase with volume. In other words, the louder things get, the less easy it is to hear exactly what is going on.

This means that important strands and linkages can be obscured in climactic passages. In Brahms, this means that vital threads in the argument can appear to go missing. It was fascinating to hear the orchestra’s former principal conductor at work just a week after Russian conductor Vladimir Altschuler, a man who often got the orchestra playing even louder than Markson, but rarely at the same expense of clarity.

In Brahms’s Second Symphony, Markson’s approach melted as the work progressed. After over-burdened accounts of the first two movements, he brought a real sense of easy fluidity and flexibility to the lightweight third movement, and, following an appropriately reined-in start, he delivered the finale with a racy, punchy fire which delighted the audience.