Hannu Lintu introduced the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra's final concert of the season at the Concertgebouw by explaining that in composing his iconic Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Krzysztof Penderecki had “abandoned everything that had held classical music together”. Lintu told the audience, “If you enjoy it... we are doing something horribly wrong”. The audience laughed nervously, then the Finnish conductor faced the 52 strings and the agony started.
As Lintu let his forces loose in infinitesimal increments, the pain that rose from every impenetrable stillness rose into a carpet of screams. As he had talked in his introduction about the new tools Penderecki had devised for scraping, rubbing, knocking and otherwise abusing stringed instruments, Lintu conducted with intricate concave and convex hand gestures and body language that also might have been invented for this piece, in this case for physically sculpting the music in the air both for audience and orchestra. The silence at the end before the audience realized it should applaud was deafening.
From the first bars of Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major, a generous warmth suffused the orchestral playing with gorgeous woodwind accents. After Marc Bouchkov negotiated his opening arpeggios and swept into the landscape leading to the his first stormy outbursts, the intensity with which he arched his back with a gymnast's stretches while ripping off some of the music's most violently passionate phrases was set against by the sweet, noble plane of the orchestra. Bouchkov made Joachim's cadenza into a piece on its own rather than a series of episodes, as if Brahms had composed it himself. Bouchkov found his own sweetest spot in the central section of the slow movement; at the end the strings strummed out their triplets as if they were guitars. The sweep and pace in the finale became increasingly edgy, and the orchestra's broad legato force overwhelmed the soloist several times.
For his encore, Bouchkov's played Ysaÿe's profoundly difficult, impossibly entertaining Danse rustique from the fifth Solo Sonata with all the magic I heard when he captured First Prize at the Montréal International Competition in 2013. This was the third of the three concertos Bouchkov has played with the orchestra this season as Artist-in-Residence; the others were by Stravinsky and Korngold.
After intermission, Lintu released the opening bars into Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony as something softly rounded, projecting an unusually romantic vision that the Philharmonic's wonderful strings made intimately personal. Once things were underway Lintu maintained an implacable pace to support the threatening low brass and other brutal menace; he made sure that that the music's shattering breakdowns into violence also let in its light and redemption, particularly obvious against the backdrop of Penderecki's Threnody. The balances were not as intense as they might have been the night before, when the orchestra would have been fresher, and the conductor's unusually abrupt segue into in the fourth movement muted the terrifying impact of the march. After the applause, the emotional toll was evident on the conductor walking up the Concertgebouw's iconic staircase; it was as if he had wrestled for Shostakovich's musical soul.
