Circus Polka - Stravinsky
Violin Concerto No 1 - Prokofiev
Old Russian Circus Music - Rodion Shchedrin
Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto does not seek to dazzle the audience. While its second movement is packed with evident virtuosity, the outer ones cast the soloist as protagonist in a mellow, ruminating discourse. It was the second work in Tuesday's lunchtime orchestral concert, and in Elizabeth Cooney it had a young soloist who understands it.
Her sound was unfailingly beautiful, her rhythmic sense alert and subtle, and there was not one attempt to impress with a cheap shot. The NSO and conductor Alexander Anissimov played the orchestral part reliably, though without the definition of texture and rhythm that makes the most of the relationship between orchestra and soloist.
The programme was characteristic of the more thoughtful approach the series has taken recently. Stravinsky was living in America when, out of necessity, he wrote his Circus Polka in 1942. Even though Tuesday's performance did not have the precision that makes the most of this deliberately bizarre music, it was full of the cumbrous grace one would want from a piece written for the 50 elephants of the Barnum & Bailey Circus.
Rodion Shchedrin wrote his Old Russian Circus Music in 1989 for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It is rooted in the same ground as Stravinsky, but it also shows why Shchedrin was one of the most successful composers in the Soviet system. The collation of old melodies and characteristic circus sounds is genial, technically skilful and imaginative in detail.
But it is so grotesquely long that its geniality becomes self-mocking. All these qualities came across in this performance, and it was typical that one left the concert uncertain as to how one was supposed to take this music.
