This latest concert launched The Anvil's 2025-26 concert season, bringing together Icelandic star turn Víkingur Ólafsson and the Philharmonia Orchestra. The Reykjavík-born pianist has in recent years been endowed with almost legendary status and hailed by some as the new Glenn Gould. He is the Philharmonia’s featured artist, in a season celebrating the orchestra’s 80th birthday. Glad tidings all round, especially for those of us fortunate enough to hear Ólafsson perform Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto under the baton of Santtu-Matias Rouvali.
The concerto came straight after a rousing account of Sibelius’ Finlandia where the orchestra had fielded some 52 string players, all of whom remained for the Beethoven where beefy tuttis were played with full bows. What could have been a balance issue was avoided, and while the forces were hardly what the composer could ever have envisaged at the Viennese premiere in 1803, there were moments of great refinement with supportive passage work, notably in the first movement’s development, where string tone was impressively veiled with woodwinds beguiling in some superbly shaped phrases.
Throughout, Ólafsson provided power and bone-china delicacy, never consciously demonstrative but always considerate to colour and weight and flawless in articulation. His cadenza was bathed in cannon fire and rose blossom where thundering octaves and tasteful trills caught the ear. But it was the emotional depth of the slow movement that brought the most gratifying moments; an account that could have been a confessional with poignant exchanges between flute and bassoon underpinned by rippling arpeggios, the whole calibrated with exquisite tenderness, Ólafsson raising his left hand towards the end of his cadenza to hold back the arrival of the closing paragraph. After a playful and neatly executed finale, we were treated to a short nocturne-like piece entitled Ave Maria by the Icelandic composer Sigvaldi Kaldalons.
Earlier, Sibelius’ nationalist hymn, conceived to provide hope and solace, which unfolded with passionate intensity, snarling brass and ferocious timpani, suggesting a full-bloodied statement of Finnish pride and self-identity. This suspenseful traversal was not without incident, with an unmarked accelerando between two tempo changes and a curious vibration (accidental or deliberate?) coming from tremolo double basses. But the whole was lit up by Rouvali’s clear, if flamboyant, gestures, rhythmically incisive yet coaxing warmth of tone from the strings and crafting the great tune with care and attention to detail.
Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite arrived after the interval, its original 1910 ballet score once prompting the assertion of it being the finest work that his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov never wrote. On this occasion it was the third version (1945) of the orchestral suite being presented – a revision more economically scored than that of 1919, while including some of the ballet’s magical transitional material. Suitably dark intimations of the evil sorcerer Kastchei were conveyed by the basses at the start, strings and woodwinds subsequently evoking the Firebird’s bejewelled plumage. Thereafter Rouvali variously brought out the score’s exoticism and melancholy with flute arabesques affectionately rendered. If momentum periodically sagged in the Pantomimes, Rouvali brought clear definition to the Pas de deux and Infernal Dance. With so many impressive solos to be singled out (particularly in the Berceuse), it was Norberto Lopez’s mellifluous horn in the Final Hymn that captured the valedictory atmosphere to perfection. Yet the closing farewell felt perfunctory, a sense of ecstasy and majesty strangely absent in an otherwise admirable performance.
