Page 241 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

of epic ease that comes when an orchestra and its music director know each other like the backs of
their hands. Elder didn’t need to micro-manage, he just allowed the music’s mighty river to flow.
Here and there, as at the beginning of the Scherzo, I missed a sense of eager urgency. But the
reflective moments, like the sunset glow of Wagner tubas at the end of the slow movement were
truly sublime. IH

LSO/Rattle, Barbican ★★★★★

If you think you detect a glimmer of a smile in the above photo of Isabelle Faust, the great German
violinist who last Thursday performed Brahms’s violin concert with the LSO, you’d be right. In fact
she smiled a lot during the performance – which tells you something, because violinists are not
normally given to smiling during this piece. It’s too massive, too heroically striving, and so difficult
it often seems as if Brahms is composing against the violin rather than for it.
For Faust, it seemed if not exactly a breeze, then something joyous as well as many-shaded and
subtle. She could certainly dominate the orchestra when necessary, but not through sheer force,
the way a violinist such as Leonidas Kavakos would achieve it. It was more to do with delicate
exactness. One’s ear was seized by her decorative passage-work amid the triumphant din, the way
one’s eye would be caught by a string of pearls seen across a crowded room. And she plumbed the
emotional range of the piece in an unusually searching, thoughtful way. The mysterious section
when the music ventures into some lonely, lost region has never seemed to eloquent. But Faust can
rise to gleeful high spirits too, as the gypsy finale proved.

In all this, the London Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle was tenderly spacious in support,
and often richly beautiful in its own right too – as in the slow movement, when oboist Olivier
Stankiewicz floated that heavenly melody over a radiant sea of woodwind sound. But it was the
evening’s other piece, Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, that really allowed the players to shine.

The LSO conducted by Simon Rattle perform Johannes Brahms Violin Concerto CREDIT: Mark
Allan