Celebrating notable anniversaries should be a joyous affair. Sadly, this event fell rather flat. Cadogan Hall has been marking 20 years of frequently enterprising and engaging music-making, a venue regarded by many as intimate and welcoming. Throughout this period, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has been its Resident Orchestra, appearing with a variety of conductors and soloists.
Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru brought with him the first orchestral work of a young compatriot: Oana Vardianu’s Genesis. The title doesn’t actually allude to a new beginning; instead it offers a retrospective glance at how music has evolved over the generations. This is difficult to achieve in just ten minutes. There was evidence of compositional skill, to be sure, but a lot was purely derivative. A groaning from the lower strings and woodwind voices slicing through these textures at the start seemed to point to Sibelius. There were interesting spiccato effects and ostinato patterns from the upper strings, pastoral elements from the woodwind, and taut Stravinsky-like rhythms. Most strongly of all, folkloristic influences from Bartók and Enescu revealed the composer’s heritage. The ears were charmed rather than assaulted, with moments of stasis where the music seemed to hang in mid-air before collecting itself for a further burst of energy. I remain unpersuaded that this is a distinctive new voice commanding attention.
Having heard a good many bland and featureless performances of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor in my time, in which all hints of Romanticism were smoothed out, it was refreshing to hear Bomsori Kim taking heed of the composer’s molto appassionato marking in the first movement. There was plenty of youthful passion, urgency even, with a fearless attack in the cadenza. On the debit side, I found her tone less than ingratiating and whenever she engaged the G string it became raspy. Uneven bowing and an absence of a truly legato line deprived the music of its essential serenity. Măcelaru matched his soloist with a full-blooded accompaniment.
Matters improved in the central slow movement. Even if Bomsori never quite achieved an airborne quality, her playing was neat and sweet with uniformly secure intonation. I liked the degree of capriciousness she found at the start of the Finale, with rhythms that consistently danced, and a few feline snarls from her instrument too.
There are not many southern European conductors who have ventured successfully into Nordic music. What stood out for me in Măcelaru’s reading of Sibelius’ Symphony no. 5 in E flat major was his ear for orchestral sonority, from the attention given to the excellent RPO wind principals down to the snapping of the double basses in the final movement. I had expected more in the way of warmth and passion, but there were no surges from the strings or episodes of dramatic excitement. I missed a clear delineation of string lines: they rustled a lot, especially in the opening movement, yet without a clear destination in sight, with the repeated ostinato patterns sounding like so much treading of water.
For wide stretches of a relatively slow performance, it felt as though Măcelaru was driving with the hand-brake still on, with little awareness of structural features. When the bell-like tolling of chords from the horns begins to register in the Finale, the heart should miss a beat: there are few passages in all Sibelius which have such an uplifting sense of majesty. Sadly, not in this case. How did Măcelaru approach those six hammered chords at the very end? They can be made to sound exultant or even enigmatic. Here they were quite perfunctory, despatched with minimal pauses.
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