EIF Music reviews: Bamberger Symphoniker: Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony | Alexandre Kantorow

Usher Hall

★★★★★

For the second night of their EIF residency, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra turned to two late greats and earned themselves a whole lot of new fans. Brahms’ Double Concerto for violin and cello was his last orchestral work, and Dvořák’s Ninth, From the New World, was his final symphony. Fulsome and enthusiastic applause was well deserved for a seamless performance of consistent precision across both composers’ symphonic swansongs, while also allowing the familiar to be heard anew.

What a pairing in bringing together German violinist Isabelle Faust with Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta for the Brahms. Already regular chamber music collaborators, they not only matched in balanced sound and tone, but also with agile technique and shared musicality. Whether Brahms or Dvořák, orchestral momentum never stalled under conductor Jakub Hrůša. While the world’s most famous cor anglais solo was simply stated over hushed strings in the slow movement, the Scherzo to follow raced off, with Hrůša mesmerising to watch as he accelerated the tempo, or shaped the flow of the music with a shrug of the shoulders or balletic like whole body moves as the music worked towards its exhilarating, full throttle climactic peaks.

Carol Main

Alexandre Kantorow

Queen’s Hall

★★★☆☆

Disconcertingly, French pianist Alexandre Kantorow ambled quite unassumingly onto the Queen’s Hall stage for a recital that was anything but. This was heavyweight, hardcore music from start to finish (well, almost), and Kantorow left nobody in any doubt as to his technical prowess in taming it. Even his opening Brahms Rhapsody had a kind of granitic power, and he thundered through his Liszt Vallée d’Oberman with the kind of fierce intensity that views the piano as an adversary (not without reason did a few notes sound slightly out of tune in the second half). There was quiet reflection, too, and beautifully judged washes of sound in the Liszt piece that demonstrated the kind of unusual sonorities a piano is capable of – something Kantorow seemed to revel in.

But there was also a sense of sheer sonic power trumping clarity and balance: a daring amount of pedal, for example, made textures rich and resonant but also muddy, something particularly noticeable in the jarring sustained dissonances in the Bartók Rhapsody Op.1 that closed Kantorow’s first half. Balance was clearer in his concluding Rachmaninov First Sonata, and Kantorow offered a persuasive and thoughtful perspective on its epic-scale architecture. His second encore – Ravel’s fiendish Jeux d’eau – had all the glitter and ringing clarity that seemed in short supply earlier in the programme.

David Kettle

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