Dinis Sousa gave an illuminating and very warm introduction to the programme before plunging us directly into the cold. Kaija Saariaho’s Ciel d’hiver was an epic in miniature, a synaesthetic sweep of the vast Finnish winter sky lasting only nine minutes. Played with a shivering degree of atmosphere and an easy, unforced accuracy in the multi-part writing, I could have listened for far longer.
Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is one of the composer’s most frequently performed works; rarely however can it have been performed with such vigour and intensity, coupled with a willingness to admit the dark side of Bartók’s writing which, though ever present, is not always acknowledged to this degree. Sousa and the RNS were assured in their handling of the blisteringly fast contrapuntal passages which emerged balanced, accurate – and thrilling – from the interior of the music, but still retaining a clear, communicated grasp of Bartók’s overall architecture. There was fine playing across the board but notable contributions came from Emily Davis on the first desk and Benjamin Powell at the piano.
After the interval there was the most complete, the most emotionally coherent account of Beethoven’s so-called Emperor Concerto I have ever experienced. Beethoven’s defiance in the face of war, which he detested, is often given in the form of bravura, thunderous octaves, musical cannon balls, but there was none of this in Víkingur Ólafsson’s masterful account. There was fire when there needed to be fire, tenderness and understanding elsewhere, most particularly in the magisterially slow second movement. Ólafsson waited nearly a full minute between the first and second movement before he gave the go-ahead to Sousa, who had held the orchestra motionless on alert. The translation from the second to the final movement was unearthly, transcendental, sublime.
After a moving full embrace between soloist and conductor, Ólafsson was called back time after time by the audience, many of them standing in tribute. He spoke briefly and mentioned his experience at St James’ Park the previous evening when he and Dinis had gone to the football together to see Newcastle (a team he has been supporting since childhood) beat Arsenal and where he says, he “learnt some interesting new words”. Then, in the kind of silence which is actually communication, he played his own arrangement of an interlude from Rameau’s Les Boréades, The Arts and the Hours, a moment of necessary stillness and contemplation.
