The Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, is one of the world’s most distinguished music colleges, and its orchestra is currently on a major European tour, conducted by Osmo Vänskä. They are giving concerts in some of Europe’s most celebrated halls – Helsinki Music Centre, Konzerthaus Berlin, Salzburg Mozarteum. In London, however, the Curtis Symphony Orchestra was obliged to squeeze into Cadogan Hall, which simply isn’t large enough to accommodate the hefty programme they had brought.
The confines certainly made Brahms’s First Piano Concerto seem up close and uncomfortably personal. The soloist was Peter Serkin, who studied at Curtis from the age of 11, and whose father, the great pianist Rudolf Serkin, was director of the institute from 1968-76. Serkin’s performance was one of extremes, alternating between truculent outbursts and intense self-communing; and it was matched by Vänskä’s explosive accompaniment. Their austere treatment of the slow movement, the piano writing almost pointillist, brought it close to a standstill; the aim seemed to be to deprive the concerto of any expressive warmth at all.
The orchestra got its chance to shine with Richard Strauss’s tone poem Ein Heldenleben, although there was nothing the young players or their conductor could do to prevent such a massive score from seeming congested and overblown in such a space. The strings acquitted themselves superbly, with stand-out violin solos by the concertmaster Maria Ioudenitch, and the brass section was implacably secure – but teasing all the detail out of the compacted textures was never easy.
