Dancing down south: Domingo Hindoyan and the RLPO at the Barbican

“Spare us the violins!” non-London-based readers will say (and rightly so), but if there’s one thing London’s embarrassment-of-riches concert scene lacks, it’s opportunities to hear the embarrassment of riches that represents the symphonic scene across the remainder of the UK. So to have the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with its Chief Conductor Domingo Hindoyan at the Barbican this week, and only three months after Hindoyan’s debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra there, felt like a proper treat. What was more, they’d come bearing crowd-pleasers: Roberto Sierra’s orchestral fiesta-cum-fireworks-show, Fandangos, Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Pablo Ferrández as soloist, and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.

Fandangos (2000) – which appears on the orchestra’s 2023 album of Sierra works – is a vibrant, ostinato-underpinned, castanet and tambourine-spiced exploration of the rhythms of the traditional Spanish dance which draws on two 18th-century fandangos by Antonio Soler and Luigi Boccherini, and works itself into a climax that could be taken as a sort of 21st-century answer to Ravel’s La Valse. In the Barbican it had neat snap, bang and sparkle. Its sudden atonal, effervescent tornadoes packed a punch as they rolled in and out, and Hindoyan, balletically erect and twirling his baton at times like a magic wand, conjured up a magnificent final crescendo.

Elgar’s Cello Concerto – his last major work, premiered in 1919 in the aftermath of World War 1 – was written in the dual consciousness of his beloved wife entering her final illness, and of his own musical language being gradually perceived as outdated. To hear this at-times heartrending music from such a poet as Ferrández promised, on paper, a satisfaction slam-dunk, and Ferrández did indeed deliver on poetry in spadefuls. Tonally too, his velvety slenderness was sublime. His pursuit of chamber closeness with the orchestra also made for fascinating listening and viewing, him at times balancing himself so perfectly into the middle of their textures as to be simply a first among equals. 

Yet, as an interpretation, something felt not quite right. The fact that his sound was not a large one wasn’t in itself a problem, given that it still cut through the orchestra and into the hall. More confusing was why those famous opening fortissimo opening chords were played – beautifully – mezzo forte; and presumably deliberately so, given his bow was far enough away from his bridge to hamper greater power. Audibly and visually, his interest appeared to be more in the work’s beauty, and in creating the most transcendent sound, and less in its melancholy, grief or power (the orchestra itself compensating on the latter). If Elgar’s Cello Concerto is simply about abstract beauty and poetry, then this performance delivered. If it’s about something more, then it fell short. Pablo Casals’ Song of the Birds – written and widely performed by Casals as a call to world peace – was equally slenderly beautiful as his encore, but this time also spoke spellbindingly. 

No caveats though to the enjoyment of Rachmaninov’s own last major symphonic work, the Symphonic Dances completed in 1940, three years before his death, with its Dies irae finale. Big, bold, sharp-contoured, tonally polished, vitally pulsing with rhythm and dance, and dangerous where you’d wish it, Hindoyan and the RLPO gave us the goods, teasing out its rhythmic connections to Fandangos as they went. Stars of the show were the violins, constantly knocking off one’s proverbial socks, from the wide, smoky strength of the first violinist’s central movement solo, to the sections’ proud, girthy, golden-hued, soaring playing as a whole. Then for a meltingly lyrical encore, RLPO horn player Timothy Jackson’s arrangement of Rachmaninov’s song, Zdes' khorosho. Wonderful.