The choral climax of Vasily Petrenko’s Beethoven cycle with his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – all the symphonies played over 10 days – coincided with the arrival in town of the Labour party conference. No prizes for guessing where the spirit of brotherly love was more convincing – and it wasn’t in the conference centre down the hill by the Mersey.
To judge by the fire and precision that Petrenko brought to the Ninth Symphony, this was a season-starting cycle to treasure. Petrenko may appear a coolly restrained presence on the podium, but his orchestra played throughout with a fierce concentration that spoke of total rapport.
Petrenko moulded the opening movement’s journey from darkness to light with a tight grip on the modern style. Yet there was enough space in the phrasing for the eloquence of the RLPO’s fine woodwind section to shine through. The second movement hummed along to the crack of the timpani, the pace never faltering. There was great sweetness in the string playing in the adagio, though perhaps not the sense of wonder that can illuminate this movement as it unfolds.
The finale was full of fine things, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir warming to Schiller’s invocation of joy, and soprano Veronika Dzhioeva leading the solo quartet into the starry heavens. Petrenko’s beautifully judged orchestral rubato at the start of the coda showed that small things were not neglected in this biggest of all symphonic pictures.
All this and, before the interval, the very different world of Berlioz’s song cycle Nuits d’Été, too. Mezzo Anna Stéphany’s idiomatic account went to the poetic heart of Théophile Gautier’s songs of loss and evanescence, with Petrenko conjuring silkily sympathetic accompaniments.
