Kirill Karabits has been chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra since 2008 but, as far as London concert-goers are concerned, he remains something of an unknown quantity. While he has regularly brought the Bournemouth orchestra to the Proms, he has otherwise made disappointingly few guest appearances with the capital’s orchestras. But with Simon Rattle isolating in Berlin after testing positive for Covid-19, Karabits stepped in for the series of concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra that Rattle was due to conduct this month, leaving the scheduled programmes unchanged, including this pairing of works by Hungarian expatriates, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and the violin concerto by Miklós Rózsa.
Rózsa is best remembered now for his film scores – nearly 100 of them, including the music for Ivanhoe, Ben-Hur and El Cid – but he made a point of spending three months of every year writing for the concert hall, and composed his violin concerto in 1953 for Jascha Heifetz. It’s a hefty, half-hour work, vividly scored, with immense technical challenges for the soloist – never profound music, but always dazzlingly effective, and a perfect showcase for Heifetz’s virtuosity. The themes have a distinctly Hungarian flavour: the opening echoes that of Bartók’s second violin concerto, and passages in the finale recall Zoltán Kodály’s orchestral music. The soloist was the LSO’s leader, Roman Simović, who apparently had been introduced to the work by Rattle. Simović had obviously taken to the piece – his performance had all the gutsy intensity and soaring lyricism that anyone could possibly want.
If it was hard to imagine a better performance of Rózsa’s concerto, then Karabits’ account of Bartók’s all-too-familiar Concerto for Orchestra was pretty exceptional as well. There was real drama and tension in the opening movement, edgy playfulness in the duetting of the second, moody bleakness in the central elegy, and a finale that steadily ratcheted up the excitement. The orchestral playing was consistently brilliant; Karabits should be a regular visitor to the LSO from now on.
