Royal Liverpool Philharmonic at the BBC Proms - 25/08/2016

THE Liverpool Phil are on something of an emotional and artistic high this year as they celebrate their 175th anniversary and 10 years with Chief Conductor Vasily Petrenko holding the baton.

Early in July, a concert to mark Petrenko’s 40th birthday featured Rachmaninov’s 3rd Symphony and the Cello Concerto No.1 by Shostakovich, composers that have become prominent in the orchestra’s repertoire both in concert and on record. On that occasion the cellist was Truls Mork, who was scheduled to repeat the work with the Phil at last night’s Prom, alongside the Rachmaninov Symphony.

When Mork had to withdraw due to illness on the morning of the concert there was some nail-biting in the Phil camp until the 25-year-old St Petersburger Aleksey Stadler came to the rescue, flying in just in time to get in one rehearsal with the orchestra before delivering a performance of huge stature. The Shostakovich concerto is a large and technically demanding piece, with the prescribed fireworks for sure, but with a deeply passionate core surrounding its central, extended cadenza movement. Nobody could have guessed that there had been so little time to prepare, as cellist and orchestra were so emotionally in tune with each other and the performance received a rapturous response from the capacity audience in the Royal Albert Hall.

Another work with passion at its core began the concert, as the Phil presented the world premiere of Torus by Liverpool born composer Emily Howard. Howard’s background in mathematics features strongly in her work, and Torus is built around the eponymous geometric shape, like a ring donut, but described by Howard as being like a stretched ball held together by a central void. It is an expansive piece, running nearer to half an hour rather than the estimated 20 minutes, and between serene landscapes in the strings that open and close it there are passages sounding like anger and despair. In her program note Emily Howard describes imagining a sphere with its heart ripped out, and at times the piece felt like an elegy for the sphere on which we live. There is a cinematic quality to the writing and in some of the desolate string passages it was almost impossible not to conjure images of the recent devastation of the Italian earthquake.

The program ended with Rachmaninov’s 3rd Symphony, not often enough heard on the concert platform. If Emily Howard’s music sounds as though it might have been written for the screen, it’s easy to see how so many writers of film scores have been influenced by Rachmaninov, with the passionate sweep of the melodies and the vivid, technicolour orchestration. The Phil were on sparkling form here and with Petrenko’s mastery of the balance between emotional depth and sheer Hollywood glamour it’s clear why audiences fill houses for their performances.

At the end Vasily threw us a parting gift with Shostakovich’s Tahiti Trot, played with characteristic humour and flair and charming the socks off the prommers.

Flying the flag for Liverpool on the world stage, at this most prestigious of music festivals, The Phil showed us again why the city is so proud of them.

Vasily Petrenko and the RLPO - Photo (C) Mark McNulty

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

RLPO close their 2015/16 season - 09/06/2016

Last  week the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic brought their main concert season to a spectacular close in a concert given performances on Thursday and Friday nights.

Vasily Petrenko conducted an orchestra of over 100 players, beginning the evening with Skryabin’s exotic and opulent Poem of Ecstasy. This is sumptuous scoring for large forces and can often sprawl or feel overblown, but this performance was well controlled and the ebb and flow of emotion kept under a tight rein by Petrenko. Strikingly, every detail of the dense orchestral textures was clearly defined even in the most heavyweight passages, the massive climax at the close supported by the hall’s organ, felt rather than heard, just beneath the surface.

The emotional tension was relaxed when the orchestra were joined by Welsh harpist Katrin Finch, ending a brief residency with the Phil in a performance of the rarely heard Harp Concerto by Reinhold Gliere. The concerto has a cinematic romanticism, bringing to mind the scores of Korngold, and uses a surprisingly large orchestra to accompany an instrument like the harp. Finch’s playing, though, had the power to project through the orchestral sound whilst never losing its delicacy. The concerto’s central theme and variations movement in particular was a great showcase for her playing, which probably made converts of some of those listeners not generally keen on the harp.

The concert closed the season with Stravinsky’s epic Rite of Spring, one of the most notoriously groundbreaking works of the 20th century. We have heard Vasily conduct the Phil in this work a number of times, but never with this kind of power and electricity. Having got his reading of the score under their skin, the players added extra layers of raw, elemental urgency to their playing. Every detail of the writing was absolutely clear and in place, but the energy and tension in the performance was simply breathtaking, and well deserving of its standing ovation.

The stage was festooned with microphones, as the performance was being recorded for a Stravinsky project to include The Rite of Spring, Petrushka and The Firebird.

Whilst this concert brings the 2015/16 season to an end, the Phil will give more performances during the summer, starting on 18th June with a sold-out concert of the music of John Williams.

The 2016/17 season, which will be Vasily Petrenko’s 10th with the orchestra, begins on 15th September. Tickets are already on sale to subscribers and general booking opens on 4th July.

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

Szymanowsky, Rachmaninov & Schoenberg - Philharmonic Hall Liverpool - 28/04/2016

On Thursday the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic were joined by the latest in a run of outstanding soloists that Phil audiences been treated to in recent weeks. Chinese pianist Niu Niu may be only 19, but he’s already an experienced concert performer and recording artist and his 2013 EMI album of Liszt transcriptions was recorded in the RLPO’s studio, The Friary in West Everton, so he’s no stranger to Liverpool.

Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini was a great choice of work for Niu Niu to debut with the orchestra, its variations enabling him to demonstrate a wide range of colour and texture, from dramatic weight to delicate fluid playing.

The prolific Polish conductor Jacek Kaspszyk, making a welcome return to Liverpool, opened the concert with the rarely heard Concert Overture from his countryman Karol Szymanowski. An early work, the overture feels as though it owes much to Richard Strauss in the opulent scoring and shifts in dramatic energy. A substantial piece for large orchestra, we are left wondering why this doesn’t feature more often in concert programmes.

A similar question might be asked of the work that occupied the second half of the concert, and the extravagant orchestration probably serves partly as an answer in both cases. Schoenberg’s orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor turns a relatively unloved chamber work into what is effectively a symphony. Another early composition, both for Brahms and for Schoenberg, it begins feeling very much like the symphonies of Schumann, flirting with Mendelssohn in its intermezzo movement before finally finding the world of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances in its exuberant “Rondo alla Zingarese” finale. For this work, Kaspszyk placed the French horns to the far left of the stage behind the back desks of first violins, which created an unusual but intriguing spread of sound.

Sadly, the appearance of names like Szymanowsky and Schoenberg on a concert programme often frightens audiences off at the box office, and there were quite a few empty seats in the hall. This is a shame, as these two less familiar framing works to Rachmaninov’s perennial crowd-pleaser were hugely well received and, above all, the whole concert felt like enormous fun for audience and performers alike. Appropriate for the concert to end on an exuberant note, as it also marked the final appearance of first violinist David Whitehead, who is retiring after 32 years’ service with the orchestra.

Niu Niu - Image (c) Mark McNulty

This review was originally written for Good News Liverpool