Page 252 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

On Thursday night, the main orchestra brought us a brand-new piano concerto, commissioned as a
result of the orchestra’s partnership with the Leeds International Piano Competition, where the
orchestra awards a Contemporary Music Prize. In 2021, it was won by Kazakh pianist Alim
Beisembayev, who also carried off the main prize, a double win that was thoroughly deserved.
There’s no pianist under 30 in the world I would rather hear.

The prize was for him to give the world premiere of a newly commissioned piano concerto from a
composer of his choice. Beisembayev went for the 75-year-old Jamaican but British-based
composer Eleanor Alberga – a shrewd choice, as it turned out. Contemporary piano concertos
often seem curiously oblivious of the piano’s history, giving the pianist notes that lie awkwardly
under the hand. Alberga is clearly in love with the virtuoso piano tradition from Liszt to Ravel, and
revelled in it, in a four-movement concerto that was generous in sound and profuse in ideas.

The first movement launched off in a dancing rhythm in the strings that provoked a leaping,
percussive response from the piano, redolent of the Caribbean but filtered perhaps through
Bartók’s Balkan dances. The second movement was more edgily dissonant, and was the only one
that seemed formally uncertain, ending with strange abruptness.

The third movement was a delicious nocturne, in which dreamy glitters of piano figuration rose
and fell from a sea of rich harmonies, while the fourth was a proper finale. It romped towards a
triumphant close with tumultuous virtuosity, while in the orchestra an exuberant Latin-flavoured
xylophone vied for the soloist’s spot. Beisembayev clearly enjoyed the piece, lavishing all his deft
virtuosity and prismatically varied touch on it, and the audience did too.

There was more prismatic colour in the opening piece, the second suite drawn by French composer
Albert Roussel from his 1931 ballet Bacchus and Ariadne. The sad abandonment of Ariadne on
Naxos and seduction by the god Bacchus were painted with fine-grained detail, and the final love-
dance had the right sense of disciplined abandon.

The final piece, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, was the polar opposite to everything we’d heard in
its pitiless, iron-grey tragedy. The orchestra under Hindoyan didn’t quite catch that quality – in
fact, what stood out were those more lyrical moments when human feeling peeped out, as in the
lost, lonely solos from flautist Cormac Henry. If not leaving the audience crushed at the end of this
piece is a fault, it’s a forgivable one. IH

See this concert for free for two weeks from 11 May at medici.tv. Hear it on BBC Radio 3 on May
14 and for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds.