Samsara - Fergus Johnston
Horn Concerto No 2 - Strauss
Symphony No 3 (Eroica) - Beethoven
Beethoven and Richard Strauss are respective paragons of revolutionary and conservative German music. They were appropriate composers for Friday night's NCH concert, which marked Germany's presidency of the EU. Also on the programme was an Irish work, Fergus Johnston's Samsara, which replaced the intended premiere of Grainne Mulvey's Horrendous Elation. Written in 1991, Samsara deliberately evades mainstream concepts of definition and development, and this necessitates purposeful performance. That was what conductor Gerhard Markson and the NSO aimed for and, on the whole, delivered.
The soloist in Strauss's Horn Concerto No. 2 was Michael Thompson. His command of floridity and broad melody, and the generally good ensemble, were always impressive. The lightness, textural clarity and subtle phrasing were laudable -that was what Strauss himself preferred. However, this performance was never entirely convincing, largely because there was little tension between the restrained presentation of the solo part and the almost Classical lightness of the orchestral part. Autumnal this piece of late Romanticism might be - it dates from 1942, when the composer was nearly 80 - but it needs fire in its belly.
Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony was in a different league. The fast speeds adopted for the outer movements would have sounded hard-driven without the airy phrasing and awareness of detail which were notable strengths of this performance. Markson's purposeful, large-scale shaping was revelatory and the goal-driven rhythmic tension made every event count; in that context, the omission of the first movement's repeat seemed in explicable. Everyone gave their all to this piece. It sounded as revolutionary as when the 33-year-old Beethoven wrote it.