Philharmonia/Sokhiev/Wigglesworth
It is nearly a century since the chattering classes of Paris stormed out of Stravinsky and Nijinsky's Rite of Spring. No doubt some clever clogs will try to restage the scandal in 2013, but it's difficult to imagine an audience rioting in a concert nowadays – partly because audiences who are still shocked by the new generally keep well away from it. Thus it is with the Philharmonia's Music of Today series, imaginatively and fearlessly curated by Julian Anderson. These free, short and fascinating concerts precede the evening's "main" Philharmonia event, but the extent of audience overlap is minimal.
Richard Baker, a respected if not overly productive composer, came under Anderson's spotlight with a performance of his new work Gaming, for cello, piano and percussion, and the chamber basset clarinet concerto Learning to Fly. The instruments for Gaming are altered (with Blu-Tack) so that their restricted timbral range coincides. Short, nervous motifs are passed back and forth before rising to a beautifully paced anticlimax in which the listener is lost, carried away in the process. Learning to Fly follows a more traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form, again using distilled and intelligently deployed textures.
The main concert included Shostakovich's lightly sugared second piano concerto, played with feeling and intelligence but a little too blindly by Yevgeny Sudbin (a pianist to watch), and Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, paced and voiced confidently by Tugan Sokhiev. As for the Stravinsky, though it no longer shocks, its minutely constructed primitivisms can still take an audience by the seat of their pants. Sokhiev conducted with cool-headed brilliance, and the orchestra responded with near perfection.
Richard Baker, a respected if not overly productive composer, came under Anderson's spotlight with a performance of his new work Gaming, for cello, piano and percussion, and the chamber basset clarinet concerto Learning to Fly. The instruments for Gaming are altered (with Blu-Tack) so that their restricted timbral range coincides. Short, nervous motifs are passed back and forth before rising to a beautifully paced anticlimax in which the listener is lost, carried away in the process. Learning to Fly follows a more traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form, again using distilled and intelligently deployed textures.
The main concert included Shostakovich's lightly sugared second piano concerto, played with feeling and intelligence but a little too blindly by Yevgeny Sudbin (a pianist to watch), and Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, paced and voiced confidently by Tugan Sokhiev. As for the Stravinsky, though it no longer shocks, its minutely constructed primitivisms can still take an audience by the seat of their pants. Sokhiev conducted with cool-headed brilliance, and the orchestra responded with near perfection.
