The Enchanted Lake, Op 62 - Liadov
Piano Concerto No 1 - Tchaikovsky
Symphony No 3 - Elgar/Payne
Several centuries ago, Shakespeare foresaw Elgar's music when he wrote of these "happy prologues to the swelling act of the imperial throne"; seven decades ago George Bernard Shaw prompted the composer to start work on a third symphony, but Elgar died before it could be completed. It was not until 1998 that Anthony Payne's work on the surviving sketches came to fruition. In what he calls an "elaboration", Payne has recaptured the Elgarian amplitude, the chauvinistic self-confidence, the lyrical intensity and the accompanying bombast in an extraordinary feat of constructive mimicry. The British Empire, at its height at the end of the first World War, is still the swelling theme with all its pomp and circumstance; though at the very end of the fourth movement (of which Elgar had written very little), Payne suddenly abandons the generally thick orchestration and uses - sparingly - a few bass instruments, to create a mood of sombre disillusion. In a few bars it almost negates the huge surges of sound that precede it: Vernon Handley conducted con amore, and the NSO, encouraged, joined wholeheartedly in the fray.
In Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1, both soloist (Nikolai Demidenko) and conductor emphasised the extrovert and gave free rein to the bravura aspects of the piece. There was more to admire in the performance than the music, the word prestidigitatory springing immediately to mind. Soloist and orchestra were two titans, the outcome of whose rivalry was a dead heat.
The opening work of last Friday's concert at the NCH was almost shy in its eschewal of the grandiloquent. Liadov's The En- chanted Lake was delicately and sympathetically shaped, and the sound, aided by the placing of the second violins on the right instead of the left, was enticingly full.
