Playing to a near capacity audience in Basingstoke, the Philharmonia opened the Anvil’s new concert season in style. The programme brought together the familiar and the boldly inventive in arresting performances that made clear a dynamic partnership between podium and players. For those unfamiliar with the Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru, he won a Grammy Award in 2020 for his collaboration with Nicola Benedetti in Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto.
Conductor and soloist were very much in accord with Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major, given a forthright and passionate outing and one of the most emphatic accounts I’ve heard in recent years. Nothing self-effacing or restful in the opening bars, but already a powerfully assertive tone that would anticipate a traversal prioritising muscle and weight over lyricism and intimacy. By the time of Benedetti’s declamatory first entry, I wondered how she would compete with the prevailing dynamic. But compete she did, although not without a sense of fierce determination and a subsequent coarsening of tone.
This was Brahms the firebrand, the heir to Beethoven, so the work’s sweet lyricism was only intermittently glimpsed. Her formidable technique was heard to impressive effect in Joseph Joachim’s cadenza where a warmer, more confiding tone emerged. Something of the first movement’s energy seeped into the Adagio, where Măcelaru never quite caught the movement’s charm even after Timothy Rundle’s poised oboe at the start. Business as usual in the tempestuous finale, its roistering delivered like an assault course for violin and orchestra with Benedetti clearly enjoying herself in all its bravura, if throughout more frenzied than giocoso.
The evening had begun with a performance of Nico Muhly’s imaginatively scored One Line, Two Shapes, a work commissioned by the WDR Orchestra in Cologne, of which Măcelaru is Chief Conductor. Inspired by the pandemic, the work inhabits a fundamental calm, launched by a contemplative chorale from lower strings, periodically undermined by violent outbursts to bring a constant sense of instability. Măcelaru shaped an atmospheric account that evoked a potent reminder of Covid-19 with all its heightened fears, its uncertainties grounded by a unforgettable serenity. To this striking juxtaposition the Philharmonia responded with the utmost sensitivity, leaving a lasting impression on an orchestral miniature that is far more impactful than its seven-minute timescale might suggest.
After the interval, a vivid impression was also made with Rachmaninov’s Symphony no. 3 in A minor, a work written some 20 years after the composer’s evergreen Second and bearing more kinship, not least in its three-movement design, with the Symphonic Dances. This performance, like the Brahms earlier, underlined the symphony’s dynamism as well as a wonderful alertness from the Philharmonia, the players variously bringing ardour, sensitivity and an unflagging vitality.
The work’s ravishing Hollywood theme felt initially shy and undernourished, but its tutti return surged with a newfound rapture. This was mostly an unsentimental account, its bittersweet qualities offset by potent emotions, its opening unfolding with magical calm from Mark van de Wiel’s silky clarinet. Rachmaninov creates generous solo opportunities in the Adagio, all lovingly rendered here where heart-on-sleeve rhapsodising was offset by shattering climaxes in the central Scherzo. The Finale brought cumulative tensions and a neatly delivered ‘cat and mouse’ fugato, both indicative of the Philharmonia’s superb responsiveness to Măcelaru who proved beyond doubt to be an invigorating champion of this Russian masterpiece.
