After a somewhat tepid start to this concert by the Hallé, under the fluidly demonstrative French conductor Maxime Pascal, the evening reached a triumphant conclusion, in no small measure a consequence of the exceptional pianism of Tom Borrow in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor. Before that, Brahms’ Tragic Overture provided somewhat stodgy fare, with rather thin and sketchy playing from the first violins and fluffed horn entries. It was a reading that emphasised the overture’s emotional desolation but, lacking the kind of ‘wresting with fate’ that the piece surely demands, it did not augur well for the rest of the evening.
However, from there the performance improved dramatically. Borrow may only be in his early twenties, but his Beethoven already feels assertively mature. It wasn’t just that he was note perfect, playing scales and arpeggios of crystal clarity. More impressively, there was genuine poetry to his playing of the central Largo, taking the piano’s opening phrases a touch slower than is usual, and generating considerable pathos as a result. Pascal and the Hallé were responsively alive, with particularly noteworthy playing from clarinettist Sergio Castello Lopez. This was the fourth time that orchestra, conductor and soloist have played the programme this week, so there has been time for the relationship to bed in. No doubt Borrow’s reading of this work will deepen and mature with age, but for now the perfect manipulation of dynamics in the sombre first movement and the bustling dancing quality of the finale confirmed that he is a soloist of rare quality.
Pascal is a conductor whose affinity with the Hallé has been a matter of note for several years now. If this concert is anything to go by, he is particularly suited to music written for the stage, drawing some exceptionally lithe and agile playing from the orchestra in a series of excerpts from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. The ten movements selected for performance in the concert's second half, unlike the haphazard construction of Prokofiev’s various orchestral suites, at least had the merit of unfolding the action in the order in which it occurs on stage, though it would be pushing things a little to claim that the 40 minutes of music that ensued were particularly cohesive.
Instead, we were invited simply to luxuriate in some of Prokofiev’s most lusciously tender melodies, particularly the almost operatically swooning Romeo and Juliet Before Parting, which concludes with a tuba solo which does that rare thing for this instrument, making it sing, exploited with relish by the Conall Gormley. The stompingly theatrical Montagues and Capulets and The Death of Tybalt sequence proved the Hallé to be alive to the music’s rhetorical flourishes, the strings scurrying with exceptional precision in the latter section. The selection ended appropriately with Romeo at Juliet's Tomb, in which the horns gave vent to suitably impassioned grief before the music died away with a last distant echo of the lovers’ balcony scene. The silence at the end felt both emotionally satisfying and a tribute to Pascal and the Hallé’s ability to mesmerise us with their stylish playing.
