Another live concert report:

Sat 19 Feb, Royal Festival Hall.
Philharmonia Orchestra cond. Christoph  von Dohnanyi
Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta
Mozart: Violin Concerto No.5 in A, K219
Beethoven: Symphony 4

The main reason for going to this concert was to hear Sarah Chang - I
missed her last time she was in London and the reports of her performance
then were excellent.  If Mozart is too easy for children and too difficult
for adults, I wondered if an 18-year old prodigy might be just right.

I'm fairly sure I've never heard a Mozart violin concerto played to
greater effect.  Technically she seemed to me to be as faultless as
you might expect, and she threw herself into the piece as if it were a
heavyweight romantic concerto, finding all sorts of emotion and expression
and colour and light and shade that would be missing from a more objective
reading.  Looking as if she had just arrived from a fitting for a wedding
dress without bothering to change, Chang used every inch of space in the
area between the conductor's podium and the front desks of the violins (in
fact I'm sure they moved the violins further away than usual to give her
extra space).  She was constantly moving, shifting weight from one foot to
the other, taking little steps to one side and back again, often starting
passages close to Dohnanyi and finishing them a yard and a half away,
playing at the leader as if she was serenading a couple at a candlelit
restaurant table.  I can't remember any violinist being quite so physically
involved in a piece of this kind, except maybe the young Kyung-Wha Chung,
who often seemed to be in the middle of a life-or-death struggle with her
instrument.

That performance might well have been a long way from "definitive" but it
was impressive and worth the price of the ticket.  Which is just as well,
because the rest of the evening was dull and lifeless in the extreme.  The
Bartok was competently played but just didn't get off the ground, and the
Beethoven was boring - no small achievement!  The Festival Hall was packed
full of the sort of elderly ladies who reliably turn out for anything with
LvB on the programme (I heard one of them complain to another during the
interval "That Bartok is *so* long, isn't it?"), and they all clapped
dutifully at the end, but there wasn't any feeling of buzz in the audience
at all.  The evening confirmed my impression that Dohnanyi is an efficient
conductor but a deeply uninspired music-maker.  During the current bout of
conductor-chasing around the world, I'd put him on the free transfer list.

While I was at the Festival Hall, I picked up a cut-price offer on Ian
Bostridge's "Britten" CD with the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings on
it (EMI Classics 7243 5 56871 2 8).  Superb, and possibly even better than
when I heard him do it live in Glasgow some years ago, when the Bostridge
bandwagon was only just beginning to roll.  The horn soloist (Marie Luise
Neunecker) is exceptional as well - I highly recommend this disc.

Ian Crisp
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