Yannick Nézet-Séguin became music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2012, and it’s proving a remarkable partnership if this thrilling concert – the orchestra’s first in London since his appointment – is anything to go by. The programme flanked Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto with two works the orchestra premiered, albeit almost 80 years apart – Nico Muhly’s Mixed Messages, first heard last month, and Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony, unveiled to public and critical disquiet in 1936.
A study in ambiguity and contrariety, Mixed Messages is essentially an eclectic post-Romantic/minimalist fusion, ushered in by whizzing string figurations pitched somewhere between Sibelius and John Adams, and dependent for its impact on the garish juxtaposition of conflicted material for the traditional orchestral groupings. It overstays its welcome a little, and the tension dips towards the deliberately perfunctory end, but it’s nicely tailored both to the orchestra’s prowess and its distinctive, glamorous sound, all plush strings, virile-sounding brass and mellow woodwind.
Rachmaninov’s big exercise in nostalgia – the Third, is very much a work of exile – benefited enormously from the combination of close attention to detail and heart-on-sleeve emotion that makes Nézet-Séguin such an engaging conductor, and his interpretation was focused yet emotive, a thing of grand passions and minute shifts in colour. The players just seem to have the piece in their systems. Tremendous.
The Shostakovich was also edge-of-your-seat stuff and orchestrally faultless. Lisa Batiashvili was the soloist, and was rich-toned and beautiful throughout. I prefer a bit more asperity in the bleak opening Nocturne. But Batiashvili realised the work’s emotional parabola from despair to elation via rage and grief, with almost shocking immediacy, and the crescendo of feeling though the atrociously difficult cadenza was breathtakingly done.
