Despite a shortage of connective tissue in this season opener, principal conductor Edward Gardner ensured there was plenty to like in a centuries-spanning programme that ranged from Beethoven to George Benjamin.
The latter, the orchestra’s latest composer-in-residence, was represented not by a new commission but by the piece that kickstarted the 20-year-old prodigy’s career back in 1980. Ringed by the Flat Horizon takes its title from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and its inspiration from a dramatic photograph of a thunderstorm lowering over the New Mexico desert. At 19 coruscating minutes, it’s surprisingly verbose for the famously terse Benjamin, but with Gardner’s meticulous blend of vitality and precision the sense of youthful inspiration rarely faltered.
Clangorous chimes, acidic dissonances and an ominous rumble bookended elemental episodes featuring shrieking piccolos, the blare of muted brass and cymbals that flashed like lightning. It was the eerie silences and insistent cello solos, however, that lingered longest.
Yefim Bronfman was the soloist in a textbook reading of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. The Israeli American pianist delivered an old-school performance in the very best sense, his secure muscularity assuring the audience that they were in the safest of hands. Gardner and the orchestra responded with a weighty yet elegantly sprung accompaniment, their mutual attentiveness creating a keen sense of dialogue. Bronfman was at his finest and firmest in the wide-ranging opening Allegro before showing off his poetic side in a generous encore: a spellbinding account of Schumann’s Op 18 Arabesque.
The concert concluded with an edge-of-the-seat interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. If the introductory march felt on the swift side, Gardner quickly justified his choices urging his forces on with elastic phrasing, white-hot dynamics and unfailingly convincing transitions. The protracted opening of the Andante cantabile was almost unbearably sad, with horn and clarinet solos conjuring a mood of bittersweet romance.
Syncopated woodwind and skittering strings brought a bracing tang to the insouciant waltz before Gardner plunged resolutely into the finale. Ripping into the development section with a devil-may-care swagger, he gradually let the sunshine in, crafting the music’s major-key metamorphosis in a turbocharged celebration of victory over darkness.
