Portsmouth Point - Walton
Piano Concerto No 2 - Bartok
Symphony No 4 - Brahms
Friday's concert in the National Symphony Orchestra's subscription series was an exceptional event by any standards. For, if any one concert could encapsulate the artistic malaise that continues to afflict RTE's management of the orchestra, this was it.
You might expect that, as a British conductor, Nicholas Cleobury would have something special to offer in William Walton's Portsmouth Point Overture. It was this bustling, pictorial work (inspired by an 18th-century print by Thomas Rowlandson) which introduced Walton as a bright young spark to an international audience in Zurich at the 1926 festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
Friday's performance lacked nothing in energy and splash, but was delivered in a way that offered little pleasure to the ear. It was a loose, devil-may-care performance, badly flawed in details of ensemble and intonation. The sharpness of detail that's needed to convey the point of Walton's conception was simply missing.
There was worse to come in the Bartok. Max Levinson was not a popular choice for the first prize at the piano competition of 1997, the main point against him being weakness of projection in his finals performance of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. On Friday the situation was compounded in Bartok's altogether more demand ing Second Concerto. With a conductor who failed to resolve the very considerable problems presented by the soloist's lightweight account, Levinson was quite simply overpowered, even to the point of inaudibility.
The orchestral playing here plumbed depths that the Walton had only suggested, and the crudely-conceived performance of Brahms's Fourth Symphony after the interval did little to lift the spirits. Perhaps the most heartening thing about this blackest of orchestral evenings was that the audience which witnessed it was modest in size.
