National Concert Hall, Dublin. Respighi: Fontane di Roma Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
The change at the top of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra could hardly be greater. The orchestra’s new principal conductor, Alan Buribayev, is 31, half the age of his predecessor, Gerhard Markson. Markson is German. Buribayev is from Kazakhstan – the first non- European to be principal conductor. Musically, the two men are chalk and cheese. Markson was a studious, steady hand. Buribayev is charismatic and virtuosic. German classics were to the fore in Markson’s first season. Russian music dominates the programmes of Buribayev’s first year, and he’s also favouring the past 150 years over earlier periods.
No disrespect, but I’m not sure that the kind of virtuosity that flows from the world’s leading orchestras is on anybody’s shortlist of the characteristics you might expect from the NSO. Collectively, the players simply don’t show the discipline, alertness or consistency that mark out their more successful rivals. Yet once or twice a season they take one’s breath away by playing well above their norm, usefully demonstrating that the limitations are as much a matter of the conductors on the podium as the players on the stage. Friday’s programme under Buribayev, only his second in his new post, was one of those occasions to help redefine notions of the orchestra’s potential.
The music-making in Respighi's Fountains of Romewas at once tighter than usual (witness the cultured burnish of the violin tone) and freer (the flexibility of the wind solos). And if not all of the noisiest moments were of a quality to match (the heavy brass tended to bray), Buribayev showed a persuasive restraint in the communication of atmospheric stillness.
The German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser showed himself in Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme to be one of those players with an easy grandeur of tone production. Allied to this rich, unforced voice, he demonstrated a great sense of long musical lines, and an individuality of manner that was always arresting.
Buribayev's handling of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra seemed to take its steer from the description concerto. The second movement, Giuoco delle Coppie (Game of the Couples),made the orchestral pairings seem unusually playful. The elegiac third created marvellous slow, colour-wheel effects. The burlesque of the fourth was very broad. And the Finale was taken at breakneck speed, with an impressively disciplined delivery of the almost breathlessly scurrying strings. It was certainly the most excitingly super-charged performance of this piece that I've heard from the orchestra.
