Seeing triple: Beethoven and Strauss close the Philharmonia's season

Was it reluctance to commence a concert that would bring the Philharmonia’s season to a close that delayed this performance getting underway? A desire to build excitement and suspense? In any event, by the time Santtu-Matias Rouvali took to the podium some 20 minutes late, accompanied by Benjamin Grosvenor, Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, an eagerness tinged with polite frustration was palpable in the audience. 

The Philharmonia gave us two meaty pieces for their season finale in a rewardingly exciting concert: Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C major and Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben. An interesting contrast: the former less openly bravura and instantly dazzling than some of Beethoven’s other works, the latter a thundering, fiery extrovert of a piece. 

Less openly bravura the Beethoven might be, but in the hands of the three soloists the music was simply captivating. Tonally, all three brought something slightly different: Kanneh-Mason, the youngest of the three, played with a soulful introspection, a purity and simplicity, particularly in his opening at the first movement, that contrasted with the effervescent humour and lightness of Benedetti, frequently beaming as she produced a sweetness of sound with confident flair. Binding it all together was the cool playing of Grosvenor, his playing like the clink of ice in a glass in a heat wave, dextrous, but understated. The communication between the three was exceptional, at its best in the Rondo when one could hear them egging each other on, simultaneously daring yet encouraging the other to take pianissimo as far as they could. 

Behind them, Rouvali steered the Philharmonia away from an overtly heavy sound, eliciting instead a frothy foam to cap the soloists. We saw in both soloists and orchestra a joy in each other and in the humour of the music. A refreshingly unclassical encore of an arrangement of Danny Boy capped their performance. 

To Heldenleben after the interval, one of the most high profile of Strauss’ tone poems. Some conductors focus on the bold heroism of the work and there was no doubt that for sheer experience Rouvali delivered a thrilling edge of the seat performance of Des Helden Walstatt (The Hero at Battle), the orchestra blazing yet without any real loss of definition – the woodwind entirely audible through the frenzied strings and the brass blasts – but there was a humour that came through, particularly in the Widersacher and Gefährtin sections, the former almost ironically threatening, the sibillant woodwind keening, while in the Gefährtin (The Hero's Companion), Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay’s quiet virtuosity rendered the character of Frau Strauss in vivid detail. Rouvali’s pacing was about right, though there was a touch of lag to the Gefährtin. The final section flickered with the sense of dying light as both the piece and the Philharmonia’s season came to an end.