Reaping rewards from shock and awe tactics at the rostrum

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s Finnish principal guest conductor Hannu Lintu began his concert on Friday like a man in a hurry. His approach to Dvorak’s Carnival Overture was as racy as any I’ve heard from this orchestra, almost recklessly headlong in its pacing and irresistible in its explosions of energy.

If that sounds like the recipe for splashy, slaphappy music-making, nothing could be further from the actuality. It’s true that Lintu didn’t rein in the percussion section as much as he needed to, so that cymbal clashes were allowed to obliterate the rest of the orchestra like a blinding flash of light. But the celebration that he produced – the work is the central part of a three-overture cycle originally to have been called Nature, Life and Love, so the title Carnival is self-explanatory – was achieved through levels of collective virtuosity that on other nights would have seemed well beyond the reach of the same group of orchestral players who work there week-in, week-out.

Lintu’s achievement brought to mind a conversation I had with an orchestral musician many years ago about the shortcomings of a particular visiting conductor. I was at a loss to understand why some purely orchestral arrangements of vocal music had sounded so stiff. The words help to dictate the shape of the music when it is sung. And they need to be taken into account when the vocal line is taken over by instruments. Hadn’t the conductor dealt with this in rehearsal, I wondered.

Yes, he had, I was told. And frequently. But he never insisted. Lintu is clearly a man who not only knows what he wants, but insists on it, too.

The evening’s main work was Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No 3, nicknamed the Organ Symphony because of a prominent part for that instrument. The symphony is one of those pieces that’s a part of popular culture even to people to whom the name of Saint-Saëns and the idea of a symphony might seem totally alien. One of its main themes was lifted for the 1977 hit If I Had Words, which was later used in the film Babe.

The symphony, dedicated to the memory of Liszt and written for the Royal Philharmonic Society in London (where the composer conducted the premiere), is a work that tends to get distorted by the sometimes dominating presence of the organ. It has come to be viewed as something of a spectacle – and beyond the organ, the score calls for a piano (a most unusual addition for a 19th-century orchestral work), which gets to be played by four hands in the finale.

The Organ Symphony actually doesn’t weather well any kind of spectacular approach from performers. Its true glories are a strange mixture, the accompanimental figures that derive from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, but sound like nothing out of Schubert, the no man’s land it occupies between the romantic and the classical (it is both and it is neither), the consistent novelty of sound which leaves it isolated in a class of one. In so many ways, there is nothing else quite like it.

Lintu presented it with the care of a master restorer, revealing every tiny detail and yet always keeping the bigger picture in rock-steady focus. He was respectful, and he was passionate, and the symphony sounded as fresh-minted as it must have in the composer’s own imaginative ear.

Harsh words

Between the Dvorak and the Saint-Saëns was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, a work which provoked one of the most ill-judged reviews that was ever printed. Eduard Hanslick was the writer, and the problem lay not with his view of the composer (“surely no ordinary talent, but rather, an inflated one, obsessed with posturing as a man of genius, and lacking all discrimination and taste”), nor his complaint that “The violin is no longer played: it is tugged about, torn, beaten black and blue”.

The real issue was his response to the finale, which he thought “transports us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian church festival. We see a host of gross and savage faces, hear crude curses, and smell the booze. In the course of a discussion of obscene illustrations, Friedrich Vischer once maintained that there were pictures whose stink one could see. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto confronts us for the first time with the hideous idea that there may be musical compositions whose stink one can hear.”

Any aromas that the music produced in the hands of soloist Ilya Gringolts on Friday were entirely pleasant. The work was rejected as unplayable by its original dedicatee, Leopold Auer, and its difficulties can still fox performers, so that, like a climber going up a steep hill, they slow down to allow themselves to negotiate all that’s demanded of them. Gringolts was fully in command, and delivered the work not only with impressive savoir-faire but also with real elegance.

The evening’s programme was interesting for extra-musical reasons, too. The three works were written within a short time of each other – the Tchaikovsky begun in 1878 and premiered in 1881, the Saint-Saëns written and premiered in 1886, the Dvorak composed in 1891 and first heard in 1892.

The Carnival Overture was conducted by the composer in a farewell concert in Prague before he set off for his sojourn in the US. He conducted the three connected overtures together, a form in which they are nowadays almost never programmed.

The Tchaikovsky concerto was premiered by Adolf Brodsky with the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter, in a programme that also included Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas Overture, Mozart’s Divertimento in E flat, K113, and Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, a programme that’s easy enough to imagine a 21st-century orchestra offering.

But the premiere of the Saint-Saëns was placed after a Haydn Symphony in E flat, a Mozart aria (Quando miro), and Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (with Saint-Saëns as soloist), and the concert ended with an aria from Félicien David’s La Perle du Brésil (Charmant oiseau, sung by a different soloist to the Mozart), and Wagner’s Meistersinger Prelude, a sequence that might be expected to give musical indigestion to modern concert goers.