Micheal Dervan reviews the Pittsburgh SO/Slatkin at the National Concert Hall, Dublin.

Pittsburgh SO/Slatkin

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Michael Dervan

Strauss - Till Eulenspiegel. Shostakovich - Symphony No 9. Brahms - Symphony No 4.

It's not often you'll find a symphony by a 20th-century composer sandwiched in the middle of a programme between two staples of the repertoire. But that's exactly what the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra offered in their second concert under Leonard Slatkin at the National Concert Hall.

Shostakovich's Ninth is, of course, no ordinary symphony. In 1944, the composer had spoken of a symphony for soloists, choir and orchestra to follow his epic Eighth. It was expected to be a symphony of victory. The following year, some close friends were allowed to hear the opening 10 minutes, and one of them, Isaak Glikman, described it as "majestic in scale, in pathos, in its breathtaking motion".

But the symphony was not to be. Shostakovich abandoned the project, and concentrated on an entirely new piece, just 25 minutes long, in which, in his own words, "a transparent, pellucid, and bright mood predominates".

Nowadays, of course, when anything Shostakovich composed or said can be turned on its head in the search for secret anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet messages, even the Ninth has had darker shadows cast over it.

Leonard Slatkin's Pittsburgh performance steered clear of these, and favoured a neutral and sober course. Indeed the approach was, if anything, too sober, allowing a fair amount of the scampering, neo-classical material to sound plain silly rather than merely light. The music provided a fine display vehicle for the disciplined orchestral players, especially those in the woodwind section, and the grave, spare Largo, with its long bassoon solo, was affectingly done.

Slatkin's patient neutrality allowed many of the busy colouristic clashes in Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel of 1895 to take on a kind of prophetic air, heralding the adventures into dissonance that were going to preoccupy composers in the years to come. The performance had energy aplenty, but the kind of surging warmth that can encompass both geniality and sharpness was missing.

The straight approach to Brahms's Fourth Symphony, everything laid out with care, sounded more a matter of exposition than advocacy, the kind of music-making you might expect to result from intelligence and understanding without the benefit of sympathy.

It was in the second of the evening's two encores, The Wild Bears from Elgar's second Wand of Youth suite that everything suddenly came into a different sort of focus. Here was a piece in which Slatkin pulled out all the stops, as if to ensure his listeners went away loving it, and not just admiring it.