A star performer with a perennial favourite piano concerto finished the Sydney Symphony Orchestra's latest subscription concert, but it began with another segment of the ongoing 50 Fanfares Project, Iain Grandage's Lift. Appropriately, this was genuine fanfare music, barely four minutes long, conceived with the SSO’s powerful brass ensemble in mind and performed by them, often parleying in antiphonal manner. It's well written and satisfying to listen to, with a strong, mostly tonal centre around C, finishing with what musicians usually refer to as a Tierce de Picardie. Hong Kong-born guest conductor Elim Chan directed confidently, without a baton, with sparing but precise movements.
The first half was complemented with a selection of from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suites, compiled out of frustration when the Bolshoi showed no interest in performing the full ballet. Having ballet music without dancers and only intermittent vignettes of the Shakespearean storyline could provide a limited artistic experience, but some of Prokofiev’s most enchanting music more than made up for the loss of narrative.
Curiously, it took most of the first movement for conductor and orchestra to find each other’s rhythm. Chan’s tempi were faster than usual, almost relentless, allowing for little internal breathing to Montagues and Capulets. The orchestra mostly tried to follow her (always clear) beat but fell behind them, a common if not necessarily agreeable phenomenon, at other times. Later, the brisk pace of Juliet as a Young Girl, juxtaposed with the tranquil wisdom of Friar Laurence helped their focus and the musical experience improved considerably thereafter.
The woodwinds, with their numerous solos, sounded eloquent, and though a few names could be mentioned here with praise, the program booklet only provided a generic – and therefore very imprecise – orchestra list. The violins have been sounding admirably confident in recent times; it was only the lower strings which contributed less to the cohesive sound of the orchestra. The double basses were not led by either of their strong principals. The cellos, blessed with some glorious, if dangerously difficult solo melodies in Friar Laurence or at the Death of Tybalt, sounded correct but pale, their musical lines failing to soar.
This problem was also noticeable during the first movement’s tutti sections in the Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor by Johannes Brahms, where the cellos were repeatedly imitating the famous trill-enriched melody line of the violins; however, their lower voice felt considerably weaker than the violins’ vigorous call.
All was forgotten once Sir Stephen Hough entered with his first solo, calm, finely poised and effortless, as is his style. The F major second subject – amazingly composed without any orchestral accompaniment – had all the gentle rubato it needed and Hough's quadruple octaves were as forceful as one could possibly want. In this astonishingly mature “early work”, the first significant foray of the composer into orchestral writing, the light-hearted, slightly frivolous themes were the only ones less appealing to the pianist’s artistic imagination.
Having six beats in one bar (called simply 6/4) is unusual in Romantic compositions; writing two consecutive movements, as Brahms wrote here, with that time signature, is unique in the extreme. The solemn calmness of the meditative Adagio was perfectly captured by soloist, conductor and orchestra alike, leading, without a break, to the emotional relief of the final Rondo.
As an encore, Hough presented Schumann’s brief but evocative solo work, Warum? (Why?), as if dedicating his performance to the early demise of the young Brahms’ great mentor, Robert Schumann.
