This curious, unaccountably uneven concert opened with the world premiere of Richard Bissill's Sinfonia Concertante, the latest of the new works commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra to celebrate its centenary. Bissill, a former LSO horn player now with the London Philharmonic, is something of an unknown quantity among contemporary composers. His new work is an accessible if rather anodyne piece.
It was written to show off the talents of the LSO's principal trumpet (Rod Franks), horn player (David Pyatt) and clarinettist (Andrew Marriner). All three are allotted cadenzas and solos of daunting complexity, which they played with energetic dexterity. The score, however, wears its influences - Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin - very much on its sleeve and aspires to a glitzy, rhythmic urbanity that it can't always sustain.
What followed was equally unsatisfactory. This was a performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto with Maxim Vengerov as soloist - a strangely leaden affair that refused to take flight. Colin Davis opted for extravagantly slow tempos in an attempt to stress the work's monumentality, but the results seemed protracted and sluggish. Vengerov played with his usual sweet, weighty tone, giving an interpretation of generalised grandeur, though he inserted an aggressive cadenza into the first movement. New to me, and uncredited in the programme, the cadenza was possibly his own invention. It certainly sat uneasily with the rest.
After the interval we seemed to be in a different, infinitely better concert. The work was Dvorak's Sixth Symphony, one of his most glorious and underrated scores, and Davis's performance seethed with vitality and exuberance. The Scherzo was hair-raising, the outer movements by turns magisterial and intimate. This was Davis and the LSO at their best. It was just a shame the rest of the evening wasn't in the same league.
