Monday, September 9, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
Tarmo Peltokoski, collecting orchestras as he goes (emulating his slightly senior Finnish compatriot Klaus Mäkelä), opened this Prom with Greensleeves, of sixteenth-century origin and almost certainly not by Henry VIII, used by Vaughan Williams in his opera Sir John in Love and then arranged for small orchestra by Ralph Greaves, very nicely turned by this VW enthusiast. Quite a contrast to Schoenberg’s rigorously organised Violin Concerto, completed 1936, first performed 1940 by Louis Krasner, Stokowski conducting. Patricia Kopatchinskaja certainly brings out all the music’s expressions and passions to be found in the angular lines, elegance and lyricism too, here intensely accompanied in fastidious detail. For an encore, something humorous (well, an attempt) by Giya Kancheli, written for Gidon Kremer, with Peltokoski at the piano. Following the interval, the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, vividly characterised and instrumentally bejewelled, the third-movement Largo lamenting, lonely and climactically searing, dynamically wide … and straight into a Finale that went headlong into the shadows and emerged from them massively, coerced, even if Peltokoski made too much of an unwritten rallentando, weakening the message.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022k1y
https://www.colinscolumn.com/a-conductors-no-nonsense-response-to-a-tempo-dilemma-by-leonard-slatkin/