Page 342 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

depiction of the end of the world…followed by the solo piano playing ‘Twinkle,
twinkle, little star’, as innocently as you like.

Even if you’ve heard the piece a hundred times it still works and audiences

always chuckle. Dohnányi may be having fun in this piece but it’s still fiendishly

virtuosic music to perform, requiring huge technical skill, lightness of touch and
an ability to change emotional gear rapidly between each vividly characterised

variation. Isata Kanneh-Mason has all the technique and charismatic sparkle

needed to bring these Variations vividly to life. And in this she was warmly

supported by the RLPO’s colourful, highly responsive playing and by the incisive
direction of Venezuelan conductor Domingo Hindoyan, making his Nottingham

debut.

Before this the RLPO played the suite from Bartók’s ballet The Wooden
Prince. The story is strangely Freudian and tells of a Prince who falls in love with

the Princess next door. A mischievous fairy puts a spell on the trees and the

stream, preventing him from reaching his beloved. When he eventually gets to
her, the Princess isn’t interested in him, so he makes a sort of puppet of himself,

dresses it in his cloak (and some of his hair!), waves it around on his staff and

manages to grab the Princess’s interest. To cut a rather long story short, there

are more antics from the naughty fairy (she makes the wooden prince come
alive, amongst other things) leading to a possible (though unlikely) happy ending.

The suite paints musical pictures of the main protagonists, as well as the forest,

the stream and the puppet prince. The score is one of Bartók’s most colourful

and requires virtuoso playing from all sections of the orchestra. The RLPO not
only met the composer’s challenges but shone whilst doing so, clearly at home in

Bartók’s Hungarian sound-world, skilfully projecting the vibrant driving rhythms

of the faster movements and creating some wonderfully luminous sounds in the
quieter sections.

The final piece on the programme was Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a work

which is so well-known that no orchestra which takes it on can allow itself to