Page 409 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

Co-commissioning music by Bernd Richard Deutsch was an astute move – the Vienna-
based composer now in his mid-40s and among the leading composers of his generation.
Taking its cue from the Beethoven Frieze which Gustav Klimt devised for the 14th Vienna
Secessionist Exhibition in 1902, this 15-minute piece takes a pointedly dialectical route as it
evolves from the fractured uncertainty of yearning and suffering, via the cumulative
intensity of a struggle against hostile forces, to the attainment of happiness through poetic
creation. To what degree this might be a commentary on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (as
embodied in the three parts of Klimt’s opus) is uncertain, but the motivic ingenuity and
orchestral virtuosity of Deutsch’s response can hardly be doubted – not least in a
performance as assured and committed as this.
If the indisposition of Adela Zaharia meant the regrettable omission of Strauss’s rarely
heard Brentano-Lieder from tonight’s concert (though Petrenko has scheduled them with
the Royal Philharmonic next season), hearing Jennifer Johnston in Mahler’s Gesellen-
Lieder was by no means a hardship. The four songs, to the composer’s own texts, comprise
an overview of his preoccupations (creative and otherwise) in his mid-20s with numerous
anticipations of what became his First Symphony. Outlining a delicate interplay of
pensiveness and wistfulness in the initial song, Johnston was no less attentive to its
successor’s mingling of innocence with experience, and if the surging histrionics of the third
song bordered on the melodramatic, the fatalistic procession of the final number felt the
more affecting for its restrained eloquence.

Petrenko (above) set down a highly regarded cycle of Scriabin Symphonies over his tenure
with the Oslo Philharmonic, and if the RLPO lacked any of that orchestra’s fastidious poise,
the sheer verve and energy of its playing more then compensated. Not least in an opening
movement whose unfolding can seem longer on ambition than attainment, but which was
held together with unforced conviction – the most often prolix development duly emerging
with a tautness to make it more than usually emblematic of this work’s
metaphysical Struggles as a whole.

Outwardly more compact, the remaining movements require astute and cumulative
handling such as these received here. The alternately enchanting and