During Covid when the only live music I had access to was the stuff I played myself – if I was very lucky in duet with my “bubbled” son – I yearned and yearned to hear a big orchestra with five percussionists, a harp and lots of brass. I was like a starving person fantasising about food. And I thought of that, gleefully, at this concert as it launched into the opening Roman Carnival which, almost literally, has all the bells and whistles. Brian Wright took the big melody much more slowly than I’m accustomed to and the fugal string passage wasn’t quite together but the tambourine work was delightful and the mood vibrantly joyful. Yes, this is the sort of thing I dreamed of when we weren’t allowed to have it.
Talented Mayumi Kanagawa is an unshowy performer. The music, her fingers and the violin –a 1725 “Wilhelmj” Stradivarius on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation– make all the statements. She delivered the lyrical passages in the outer movements of Prokofiev’s first concerto (1923) with sumptuous, decisive precision. The middle movement is a virtuosic show piece in which Kanagawa rose to every challenge including some arresting left hand pizzicato and accurately dramatic, double stopped glissandi. It was an outstanding performance. And the choice of the familiar Rondo from Bach’s Partitia in E major was such a well chosen contrast that it felt like sucking a mouth-cleansing orange segment.
The grand finale both for this concert and for the 2022/3 MSO season was Tchaikovsky’s grandiloquent, sometimes anguished fourth symphony. And it was a fitting choice which certainly fed my ongoing longing for the big orchestra sound. With five desks of first violins we got a rich string sound to complement the brass. Over the years, Brian Wright really has perfected a strategy for getting the balance right with this orchestra in this rather unlikely venue whose day job is a sports hall. The second movement really leaned on the tortured melodies, written only a year after the composer’s disastrous marriage. The exquisite bassoon solo over pizzicato strings at the end was a high spot.
The famous long, finger-aching pizzicato passages in the fourth movement are notoriously difficult and a pretty adventurous idea for 1878. Here it was generally cohesive and full of all the right narrative tension. Then, to cap it all, we got the fourth movement at a really exciting speed, exploding with all the fuoco the composer wanted. And I suppose the drama of those terrific cymbal clashes at the end will have to last me until the next MSO concert when the new season opens on 14 October.
Susan Elkin