Conductor Andrew Manze's interpretation of Vaughan Williams's Third Symphony with the BBC SSO on Thursday night touched the pulse of the piece.
Though entitled the Pastoral Symphony, it's anything but: it's a war symphony, though not one that features the violence and vehemence of its theme; that was to come in the visceral music of the Fourth Symphony. The Third is steeped in sad poignancy: of regret; of the grief and loss in the asinine and mindless brutality of all wars that see flesh and spirit ripped.
Miraculously, VW captured that emotional moment and his symphony is suffused with it. As wonderfully played by the SSO, it is music of a soft golden colour, achingly evoking the composer's vision and imagination, numbed and scarred as it was by his own experience, and by the sights and pain he witnessed.
More prosaically, I have to turn to the performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, the first performance in a cycle of the five concertos that will feature Steven Osborne as soloist. This is very much a minority opinion, but I have to voice it. I stand second to none in my championship of Osborne. He knows it, I know it, and anyone who has read my coverage of his playing and development in the past 20 years and more knows it.
But he was completely shackled by Manze's accompaniment, which was four-square, unyielding, un-supple, felt as though it was effortfully hewn out of rock, and placed hardly a single pizzicato note in sync with the piano. Disappointing and strangely depressing. The notes were there; the spirit was lost.
HHH
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