Page 367 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

there’s a gravity – an intellectual centre – to his conducting that made me eager to
hear him get to grips with the sacred monsters of German romanticism.

It’s something of an RLPO tradition, after all. Max Bruch – whose Scottish
Fantasy opened Hindoyan’s programme – moved to Liverpool in 1880 as the
orchestra’s chief conductor, taking a yellow-brick semi near Sefton Park and inviting
the likes of Joseph Joachim to Merseyside. Bruch and Joachim actually premièred
the Scottish Fantasy in Liverpool, presumably (the original Philharmonic Hall burned
down in 1933, but the current hall occupies its footprint) on more or less the precise
spot where the violinist Timothy Chooi stood for this performance: feet apart, head
bowed over his instrument, bobbing, swaying and occasionally sidling over towards
Hindoyan or the harpist Elizabeth McNulty, who was sitting up front by the second
fiddles.

If there was the occasional Highland squall in Chooi’s high passage-work, it was
offset by acres of rich, peaty low G- and D-string sonority: sultry, smoky, and
smoothed along by tasteful (but unembarrassed) portamenti. The Scottish
Fantasy isn’t as popular as it once was; in death, as in life, Bruch has never really
shaken his reputation as Brahms’s Mini-Me, and his First Violin Concerto has fallen
from the Classic FM Top Ten without winning its composer his rightful place
alongside Cilla Black, Sonia and the Fab Four on Liverpool’s Mathew Street Wall of
Fame. Certainly, I don’t recall hearing the Fantasy sounding quite so Heifetz-y; but a
sort of retro, pre-war tone quality is currently fashionable among younger string
soloists. There’s a thesis to be written on the YouTube-ification of performance style
in an era when a century’s worth of interpretations can be streamed in seconds.
Personally, I’m all for it.

Bruch moved to Liverpool in 1880, taking a yellow-brick semi near Sefton Park

After the interval, Hindoyan conducted Bruckner’s Romantic symphony, which is
always a bold move in the Philharmonic Hall. That glorious art deco auditorium has
many strengths – not least the fact that it’s one of the UK’s few remaining orchestral
venues where audience members can risk a discreet cough, or rustle a programme
sheet without sounding as though they’ve discharged a firearm. But one thing that the
Philharmonic Hall can’t provide, even after successive upgrades, is a sense of
cavernous, echoing emptiness – exactly the atmosphere that Bruckner requires at the
beginning of this symphony.

Hindoyan couldn’t do much about that. What he could do was encourage inner lines
to sing and speak, and to decline to wallow or linger over the view. One result was a
near-classical purpose and pace: Bruckner’s sprawling finale felt and moved almost
like Haydn. The other – a paradox of sorts – was that this level of concentration and
clarity heightened the poetic qualities of the music, generating a mood of eloquent,
autumnal melancholy in the slow movement (the RLPO woodwinds really sing as a
choir), and allowing the string sound to coalesce into great misty banks of tone:
sensuous without being over-saturated, and handled by Hindoyan with a sculptor’s
feeling for texture. This was a stirring, sophisticated interpretation from an orchestra
and a conductor whose partnership seems to have been fully formed from the off.

One fewer to worry about, then. Several UK orchestras (including Bournemouth and
the two big Manchester bands) face imminent regime change on the podium, and a
few more (discretion forbids) have made solid rather than thrilling recent
appointments. With the LSO, the soon-to-depart Simon Rattle conducted a concert