The Out of Denmark programme running in Dublin brought, on Sunday, a first visit to the NCH by the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra under one of its principal guest conductors, Michael Schnwandt. In Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, conductor and orchestra favoured a cool and clear-headed approach, judicially dispassionate about the contrasting characters and moods the composer paints, and warming up only when the music was at its most intense.
The reserve revealed in the Tchaikovsky was to be felt, too, in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, but, happily, at no time was it allowed to impinge on the freedom of the magisterial soloist, Emanuel Ax. There were moments when he suggested an impulsiveness that would have been more easily dealt with at a slightly faster tempo, yet the sense of tugging at the leash brought the best of both worlds - his playing was more noble than excitable, and the turns into reflective inwardness were beautifully negotiated.
Nielsen wanted his Fourth Symphony, The Inextinguishable, to express "the elemental will of life". Schnwandt and his players were transformed in vitality of expression and ardency of commitment through this work of rare and undisguised optimism, which was composed during the early years of the First World War.
There have been regular performances of the piece in Dublin over the years, but none as musically persuasive and spiritually uplifting as this. The orchestra, which displays an evenness, strength and full-bodied tone which is not yet in the gift of the NSO, rounded off the evening with a single encore, the frolicking overture to Nielsen's comic opera, Maskarade.
