Tapping Fresh Strata
3.26.01

Geoffrey Norris reviews the CBSO conducted by Marin Alsop at Symphony Hall, Birmingham

It is seldom that one values the abysmal slowness of the last train back from Birmingham to London, but this concert was so spellbinding, and left me in such a high state of nervous excitement, that the full two-and-a-half hours of enforced inertia were needed in order to regain some degree of equilibrium.

The reasons lay in the combination of a first-rate, cohesive but varied programme with performances that were on such an elevated level that they enhanced appreciation of the music and revealed rarely tapped strata of expression.

At the core lay an electrifying interpretation of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto by Piotr Anderszewski. Whether in the tiniest elusive miniature or in a more expansive, demonstrative piece such as this Bartok concerto, he constantly opens up new vistas in the music he chooses to perform. The strength and bravura that this concerto demands, particularly in its two outer movements, were underpinned by the substantial weight of his imagination and thought.

The surface of his sound had a characteristic glow, but it was allied to a kaleidoscopic range of subtly voiced nuance. Across a broad dynamic spectrum, from the fortissimo ebullience of the finale down to the whispered, spectral harmonies of the central Andante religioso, there was a palpable intensity. So phenomenal was the energy that he unleashed in the final pages that the repose offered by his Bach encore was the only possible answer - though even here there was no relaxation of his compelling artistry and vision.

The Bartok fitted perfectly in to a programme of music composed in America, though in fact only one of the composers was born there. Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, at the start of the concert, underlined the credentials of Marin Alsop, herself American, as a conductor who generates performances that are at once fresh, lucid and bristling with character. In this, her debut with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, she had clearly established an immediate rapport, as she has already done with other British orchestras.

In the Copland, as in Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, the playing was technically impeccable, but it had atmosphere too. There was air to the textures and an exhilarating rhythmic thrust, with the palette of orchestral colour tellingly applied and with a potent blend of physicality and insight.

by Geoffrey Norris