Dressed in a sharp suit, black T-shirt and scarlet cummerbund, sporting a man-bun and a cascade of silky dark hair, Franco-Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulović certainly has rockstar looks. But he plays like an absolute angel, caressing the strings like crushed silk to turn the middle movement of Aram Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto into an Armenian lullaby.
On the surface, Khachaturian’s concerto is painted in bold primary colours, often brash and loud – part of its appeal, to be honest – and a vehicle for supreme virtuosity. Radulović has that virtuosity in spades, especially playing the fiendish cadenza by the concerto’s dedicatee David Oistrakh, but he can also find the perfume in the score, teasing out aromatic head notes or tugging on spidery double-stopped chords. But there was no denying Khachaturian’s vulgarity either, the Philharmonia brass letting rip with a good old-fashioned Soviet blast or two.
Radulović is a “Featured Artist” this season, and it’s clear that he and the Philharmonia players have already struck up a rapport. He is the most collegiate of soloists, turning towards clarinettist Mark van de Wiel for their coquettish exchanges before the first movement cadenza, or facing the orchestra at the start of the Andante sostenuto, soaking up their sound. It was little surprise when his encore saw him duet with leader Rebecca Chan in a Shostakovich prelude. He also has an evident rapport with conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, with almost nose-to-nose contact and plenty of smiles.