After 15 successful years in Liverpool and six in Oslo, Vasily Petrenko’s appointment as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director was something of a coup. There was immediate proof of this in the Russian conductor’s ambitious and generally excellent Festival Hall debut concert in his new role. There were also plenty of signs that, under this conductor, the RPO’s profile is likely to rise just at a time when the orchestra, and musicians generally, most sorely need it.
Petrenko’s theme in this first season will be British music, and the series is being marketed by the RPO under the impeccably post-Brexit catchline of “Freedom, Hope, Adventure”, that is sure to get the new culture secretary’s approval. Future concerts will include major works by Holst, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton and Elgar, and it was the last two who provided the bookends of this programme.
Walton’s Johannesburg Festival Overture was written in 1956 for – as Petrenko pointed out from the podium – an apartheid-era city. A work of sunny insouciance, it bowled along under Petrenko’s crisp direction. Stravinsky’s Petrushka, in the composer’s original and more fully scored 1911 version, followed. This extraordinary score provided a prime opportunity not just for orchestral principals to shine in solos – special mention for Emer McDonough’s flute – but to note Petrenko’s deceptively relaxed grip on dynamics, accents and phrasing.
Elgar’s violin concerto is Petrushka’s exact contemporary, but it could scarcely inhabit a more different musical and aesthetic world – diffident, introspective and emotionally uncertain. With Petrenko rightly avoiding any temptation to linger, the Chinese violinist Ning Feng gave a rich-toned and muscular account. It may not have been in what one might call the English tradition, but the scope of the Elgar concerto can take it and there was real musical depth to the performance. As always, in its final bars, there was an overwhelming sense that soloist and orchestra were returning from a very distant place after a long journey. Ning Feng’s encore, Paganini’s variations on God Save the King, was absolutely dazzling.
