This Friday evening broadcast, free to view on the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra’s own website, placed two old repertoire favourites and two old friends of the orchestra alongside each other without ever slipping into a feeling of complacency or routine. The orchestra’s own concertmaster, Liviu Prunaru, was soloist for Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, while old favourite Myung-whun Chung directed with typical cool economy of gesture.
With a couple of desks of strings shorn from each section but occupying a similar area of the extended stage to that of a Mahler symphony (remember those?), the almost imperceptibly soft opening string line floated into hearing like a fine mist. Prunaru responded with similarly delicate, glassy stillness. Elsewhere there was a rich fullness to his sound, particularly effective in duetting with principal viola, and later with bassoon when emerging from an impassioned cadenza. The overall soft-touch approach was carried into the slow movement, where the woodwinds played their rising chords with utmost ensemble and blending, culminating in a profoundly moving passage at the movement’s close.
The finale fairly skipped along with insistent percussive vigour. Rarely have I heard this movement so eminently danceable. There was swaggering lilt in the orchestral passages, though always sensitive to the solo line, memorably so for Prunaru’s ethereal accompanying harmonics.
The approach to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony was fresh, spirited and unfettered by any fusty old ideas of how the symphony ‘goes’. From the outset there was an emphasis on heavy rubato, Chung pulling the tempo around liberally but never forced. Though the wide stage spacing perhaps contributed to an occasional lapse in ensemble, his players responded with assurance in allowing each phrase to breathe. The pace and tension quickened later in the movement, giving a convincing sense of an unstoppable ascendancy to the last minutes, driven in no small part by some roaring timpani contributions.