The City of Birmingham Symphony is currently without a chief conductor – Andris Nelsons conducted his last concerts as music director two weeks ago and no successor is yet in sight. That makes Edward Gardner’s role as the orchestra’s principal guest conductor more important than ever, and he was in charge for its visit to the Cheltenham festival.
It’s always fascinating to hear the CBSO away from Symphony Hall and the fabulous orchestral sound there. As multi-purpose municipal buildings go, Cheltenham’s town hall is by no means an acoustic disaster, but textures still tend to thicken and homogenise there, so that even the relatively small band that Gardner used for the first half of his concert, with just four double basses, was imposing enough.
He began with the depiction of chaos from the opening of Haydn’s Creation, its unresolved C minor progressions sounding far more potent than they ever did when Gardner conducted the complete oratorio in St Paul’s Cathedral a week earlier, before going straight into Mozart’s piano concerto in the same key, K491. The soloist was Steven Osborne, who seemed emboldened by the formidable orchestral sound to opt for a genuinely stormy account of Mozart’s only piano concerto to begin and end in a minor key. He did find consoling moments of lyricism, but nothing was just rococo prettiness; this was always Mozart peering into the romanticism of the next century.
That romanticism is impossible to avoid in Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, when it can easily become too much of a good thing. While Gardner’s performance didn’t exactly wallow, he did sometimes indulge the music’s tendency to long-windedness, more than Nelsons had done when the CBSO performed the work four months ago. There’s a combative edge to the first movement especially that didn’t quite come out here, though the playing was always outstanding, and the scherzo was a real tour de force.
- Available on BBC iPlayer until 31 July. Cheltenham music festival continues until 11 July. Box office: 0844 880 8094
