The concert sold well in advance, yet persistent heavy snowfall across northern Germany made travel unusually difficult. Even so, Joshua Bell’s undeniable star power ensured a house still filled to around 70% capacity. That same strongly personalised performance model – Bell as soloist, leader and artistic focal point – also defined the evening’s mixed artistic outcome, which swayed between comfort and unease.
The programme opened with Earth by Kevin Puts, a newly commissioned work whose accessibility immediately set a welcoming tone. Built around simple, tender melodic ideas, clearly delineated orchestral gestures and an easily graspable ABA form, the piece offered instant orientation. For a moment, the audience could forget the slush and chaos outside, as if sinking into a warm and reassuring armchair beside a fireplace. Supported by the harp’s evenly pulsing triads and the strings’ attentive cushioning, Bell allowed his playing to radiate unguarded lyricism, to which the Academy of St Martin in the Fields responded with polished sensitivity.
The transition to Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, however, revealed the limits of applying the same aesthetic indiscriminately. Brahms’ music is hardly the kind Aaron Copland famously described as something you simply “sit back and enjoy from the sofa”. In Bell’s vision, however, the concerto’s character emerged as oddly diminished. Rather than projecting breadth, gravity and inner tension, the interpretation often sounded salon-like, more ingratiating and demonstrative than spacious or profound.
Two issues were particularly striking. First, the generally slow tempos diminished the music’s sense of forward motion. Second, both soloist and orchestra relied on highly exaggerated, over-mannered articulation, with conspicuously elongated breathing pauses before many important phrases. Bell’s frequent use of heavily pressed tone production further reinforced an impression of calculated intensity. These strained and deliberate tendencies were most problematic in the first movement, whose symphonic breadth never fully took flight. Bell’s self-composed cadenza, while fluent, ultimately lacked distinctiveness or a convincing personal voice.
The Adagio likewise left a muted impression. Only in the finale, with its pronounced dance character and rustic energy, did Bell seem more at ease. Here, the performers found a workable balance between rough vitality and control, allowing the movement’s rhythmic drive to speak more naturally.
After the interval, Bell assumed the concertmaster’s role for Schumann’s First Symphony, and the overall result was markedly stronger. The chosen interpretive path aligned more convincingly with the work’s youthful optimism and impulsive spirit. The opening movement unfolded without hesitation – spring arriving all at once – and the woodwind section, in particular, distinguished itself with characterful, buoyant playing.
The slow movement proved especially rewarding. One of the most touching passages in Schumann’s symphonic writing, it benefited from the Academy’s close-knit string sound. The inner voices blended so intimately that the ensemble felt like an expanded string quartet. The third movement was shaped with lightness and poise, its lyrical grace kept free of excess sentiment. In the finale, Bell drew an alert, buoyant response from the orchestra. The closing pages projected an unforced optimism, bringing the symphony to a confident and spirited conclusion.
Perhaps mindful of the poor travel conditions ahead, Bell offered no encore. Despite the reservations provoked by the first half, the concert nevertheless provided a welcome moment of warmth and consolation on a snowbound Hamburg evening.
This concert was promoted by DK Deutsche Klassik
