During last summer’s Proms, the pianist Nikolai Lugansky and conductor Yuri Temirkanov gave a performance of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto with the St Petersburg Philharmonic which, for me, was close to definitive. Returning to London for a Sunday matinee with the Philharmonia Orchestra, they tackled Brahms’s very different First Piano Concerto in another striking interpretation, albeit one that didn’t quite scale comparable heights.
Lugansky is an exceptional Brahmsian, assertive in articulation, forthright yet darkly poetic in his approach, and admirably avoiding the excessive emotional gestures that can tip this most vehement of concertos towards melodrama. Temirkanov, however, took a while to get into his stride. The enormous orchestral introduction was a bit short on fury and bite, which meant in turn that Lugansky’s first entry, calm yet lofty after what should be a veritable storm, didn’t quite have the impact that it should have. Thereafter, though, the performance began to settle, and the first movement built towards a tragic statement of enormous power. Lugansky’s judgment of the darkening shifts of mood in the adagio was superb. The finale was thrilling in its muscularity and precision.
Beethoven’s Coriolan and Elgar’s Enigma Variations formed its companion pieces. Temirkanov’s way with Beethoven’s overture is slow and spacious, where some interpreters press through it: but the insistent repetitions of the melody, representing Volumnia’s wheedling, really got under one’s skin – as it should. The Elgar, meanwhile, was very immediate and heart-on-sleeve. A huge surge of emotion ended the first variation, depicting Elgar’s wife. Nimrod, shorn of its national and memorial associations, was very much the portrait of a friendship that Elgar intended it to be, but would have been much more touching had Temirkanov taken it a fraction slower. The playing was first rate.
