Hannu Lintu introduced the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra's final concert of the season at the Concertgebouw by explaining that in composing his iconic Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Krzysztof Penderecki had “abandoned everything that had held classical music together”. Lintu told the audience, “If you enjoy it... we are doing something horribly wrong”. The audience laughed nervously, then the Finnish conductor faced the 52 strings and the agony started.
As Lintu let his forces loose in infinitesimal increments, the pain that rose from every impenetrable stillness rose into a carpet of screams. As he had talked in his introduction about the new tools Penderecki had devised for scraping, rubbing, knocking and otherwise abusing stringed instruments, Lintu conducted with intricate concave and convex hand gestures and body language that also might have been invented for this piece, in this case for physically sculpting the music in the air both for audience and orchestra. The silence at the end before the audience realized it should applaud was deafening.
From the first bars of Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major, a generous warmth suffused the orchestral playing with gorgeous woodwind accents. After Marc Bouchkov negotiated his opening arpeggios and swept into the landscape leading to the his first stormy outbursts, the intensity with which he arched his back with a gymnast's stretches while ripping off some of the music's most violently passionate phrases was set against by the sweet, noble plane of the orchestra. Bouchkov made Joachim's cadenza into a piece on its own rather than a series of episodes, as if Brahms had composed it himself. Bouchkov found his own sweetest spot in the central section of the slow movement; at the end the strings strummed out their triplets as if they were guitars. The sweep and pace in the finale became increasingly edgy, and the orchestra's broad legato force overwhelmed the soloist several times.