There are few composers whose place in music history is more firmly tethered to a single work than Max Bruch. Though his First Violin Concerto may be a perennial favourite, even his other works for violin and orchestra (two more concertos and a Scottish Fantasy) only get occasional concert outings, and the rest of his orchestral output and chamber music is almost never heard. But the BBC Symphony Orchestra revived one of Bruch’s neglected scores in its concert with Alexander Vedernikov – the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, from 1915, with Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy as the the soloists.
Adapted from an existing suite for organ to fulfil a lucrative commission from the US, the four-movement double concerto is not an ingratiating work. The sisters who commissioned it rewrote much of the score themselves before they gave the premiere, and it was not performed as Bruch intended until 1970. It’s in the rarely used key of A flat minor (seven flats!) – as if Bruch was determined to make things as awkward as possible for the performers. There’s something rather ungracious and truculent about the piano writing, too, which rarely gives the two soloists much of an opportunity to do what pianists expect to be able to do in concertos, while the orchestral accompaniment often seems overbearing and doom-laden.
The best, most “Bruchian” moments come in the lyrical adagio, but even those are not especially memorable, despite Kolesnikov and Tsoy’s best attempts to gloss what there was. It was no surprise that the two pianists were easily persuaded to give an encore – the third movement of Rachmaninov’s First Suite for two pianos – which, though it was no more upbeat, at least gave them a better chance to show what they could do.
Vedernikov had placed the concerto incongruously between Webern – the magnificent Op 6 Orchestral Pieces, in their original 1909 scoring for a massive band – and the UK premiere of Red and Green, a piece Thomas Larcher composed for the San Francisco Symphony in 2010. It is a large-scale study in orchestral motion, with persistent pulsations that merge into shifting planes of sound in the first movement, and gather together in an irresistible dance in the much longer second. The orchestral colours are ravishing, the sense of pacing spot on.
• This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 25 October.
