Legions of keyboard fans know that Víkingur Ólafsson does reflective like few others. Calmness, softness of touch and introspection are among the Icelandic pianist’s widely admired trademarks. It helps make him a perfect performer for the AirPod age.
But how does Ólafsson respond to a full orchestra in a large-scale work such as Beethoven’s third piano concerto? The answer, in this opening concert of the Philharmonia’s season, is that he does it with enviable ease. It assured a distinguished start to the 80th birthday year of an orchestra whose founder, Walter Legge, had shamefully tried to kill it off when it had not even reached two decades old.
Looking at times as if he might happily conduct the whole thing from the piano, Ólafsson’s characteristically clear playing went from imposing and lyrical in the grandly constructed opening movement, through rapt and contemplative in the largo, which he began in the 18th-century manner with a tiny decorative flourish of his own, to brilliant and witty in the rondo finale. If it felt in retrospect like a performance of three separate mood pieces rather than something more fully bound together, it was a sparkling rendition all the same.
Before the concerto, Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducted the UK premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s Si el Oxígeno Fuera Verde, which the orchestra had premiered in Amsterdam the previous day. Described by the composer as a fragile green murmur of life, the environmentally inspired work is delicately scored as a bubbling forest of gentle arpeggios and trills, which eventually coheres into an insistent dance with echoes of John Adams and the Stravinsky of The Rite of Spring.
Alongside Ólafsson, who stayed to listen to the second half of the concert, the evening’s star attraction was the Royal Festival Hall organ being played at full throttle. With Notre Dame cathedral’s Olivier Latry at the organ controls, and Rouvali neatly alive to the work’s overall architecture and colours, Saint-Saëns’s third symphony is a guaranteed crowd pleaser for a special occasion – and so it proved.
• Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 29 September and then available on BBC Sounds.
