Reviews

Michael Dervanreviews Leonskajaand Teyssier

Leonskaja, RTÉ NSO/Anissimov

NCH, Dublin

Gerald Barry — No Other People. Beethoven — Piano Concerto No 4. Shostakovich — Symphony No 5.

GERALD BARRY is a composer who likes masks and mysteries, double meanings and disguises. So it can hardly be surprising that he would be attracted by the writings of someone so fond of strange layering as the French writer Raymond Roussel.

It's from Roussel's New Impressions of Africathat Barry got the title No Other People(it's an aside from the instructions sent to an illustrator who never got to read what he was illustrating), and Barry is planning another piece with a title similarly generated.

It's to be a viola concerto called No People.

In spite of the title, No Other Peoplegives the impression that it might well be inhabited by lots of other people, but in guises that are camouflaged, or through connections that are made obliquely.

Rocking figures, rich in thirds and sixths, abound, as do running passages that scamper with the hint of something familiar.

And there's even a minor evocation of the Blue Danube.

Conductor Alexander Anissimov, a last-minute stand-in for the indisposed Pietari Inkinen, took a rather coarse view of the piece, casting subtleties aside save for in the quietest passages, where he secured aptly tenuous sounds with an appropriate sense of mystery.

Elisabeth Leonskaja was the soloist in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In this, her Dublin debut, she managed to strike a near miraculous balance between old-world nobility and adventurous individuality.

Her approach was to make sure that all sense of barline was eliminated through a use of rubato that always seemed to introduce the unexpected, while at the same time seeking out the essence of the music with unfailing accuracy.

She made the concerto at once utterly familiar and utterly strange. The orchestra may not have been quite steady in its support, but her singular vision was so sure it hardly seemed to matter.

Anissimov’s approach to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony was big-boned and burly, more alert to issues of colour and mood than rhythm or ensemble, and prone to moments of brassy overstatement. But the performance was always imposing, not least in the grimness of the conclusion.

Teyssier, ICO/Martin

NCH. Dublin

Stravinsky — Concerto in D. Copland — Clarinet Concerto. Deirdre McKay — Meltwater. Dvorak — Serenade for Strings.

SANTANDER-BORN Jaime Martin, who made his debut with the Irish Chamber Orchestra on Thursday, is a musician who’s branching out from playing and into conducting. He’s currently principal flute of the orchestra of English National Opera and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, where a previous principal flute, Thierry Fischer, also branched out, and spent a time as principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra.

Martin’s ICO programme at the NCH got off to a good start in Stravinsky’s Concerto in D. The opening Vivace danced lightly on its toes, the poignancy of the central Arioso was nicely caught, and the closing Rondo was delivered with the right fizz.

Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, a Benny Goodman commission of the late 1940s, is cast in two movements which are joined by a cadenza.

The first movement is flowing and sentimental, the second brighter, jazzier, and originally sent the soloist to heights that Goodman had the composer scale back for comfort. Both orchestra and soloist, the svelte-sounding young French clarinettist Johnny Teyssier, sounded happier in the stretched lyricism of the opening movement than in the choppier energy of the second.

Deirdre McKay's new Meltwaterfor string orchestra takes its inspiration from "the desolate beauty of our planet's most extreme and inhospitable landscapes". McKay has created a world of slowly shifting, ethereal string harmonics interspersed with passages of shivering and sometimes chunky movement. Martin's performance with the ICO evoked something of the sound world and circularity of Arvo Pärt in what seemed like an intentionally chilly, distanced manner.

There was nothing distanced in the conductor’s approach to Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings. Martin’s was an indulgent performance, always taking time to seek out the lyrical gesture, so much so that a lot of the music-making sounded too slow. The spiky energy of the finale came too late to tilt the balance in a performance that often had a gorgeous radiance, but was also seriously lacking in momentum.