NCH, Dublin
Liszt– Orpheus. Scriabin – Piano Concerto. Liszt– Piano Concerto No 1. Stravinsky– Symphony in Three Movements.
The devil, they say, is in the detail. And so it proved, both positively and negatively, in the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s NCH subscription concert.
The evening was unusual for including two piano concertos, Scriabin’s in F sharp major placed before the interval, Liszt’s in E flat just after it. Sadly, the evening’s soloist, Peter Jablonski, didn’t show any great affinity with either composer.
The Scriabin concerto is, admittedly, a problematic piece. In Jablonski’s hands it sounded like a the work of a poor imitator of Chopin on the one hand and a Rachmaninov wannabe on the other. It is the music of a dreamer who shows flashes of delicate brilliance. But, in spite of the firmly anchored support offered by the NSO under Hannu Lintu, Jablonksi only managed to dawdle and to bluster.
That tendency to overplay, to thunder loudly in the bass while eschewing evenness or accuracy in the treble, undermined the kind of bravura approach that seemed to be the performer’s goal in the Liszt.
Lintu showed fine Lisztian credentials in the symphonic poem Orpheus, which opened the concert. It's a restrained work and Lintu highlighted its frequent points of inventive orchestration and unusual chiaroscuro so that everything that's special in it actually sounded special.
Lintu is a conductor who keeps everything on a tight rein, every swell and every sigh or fade in a phrase is controlled to a nicety, and nothing is ever allowed to sound routine.
Not, of course, that there's much you could call routine in Stravinsky's war-time Symphony in Three Movements. The symphony, the composer said, "was written under the impression of world events" but he expressly excluded the possibility that the music expressed his "feelings about them".
In Lintu’s probing reading, the outer movements were delivered with incisive bite, the central Andante with an almost meltingly chaste beauty.
