National Concert Hall
Piece for Big Orchestra - Sven David Sandstrom
Trumpet Concerto - Haydn
Symphony No 5 - Tchaikovsky
The Swedish composer Sven David Sandstrom, who'll be 60 next year, first made an international impact in the 1970s as an avant-gardist with an individual, aggressive voice. But since then he's doubled back, as it were, for a sometimes decadently over-the-top engagement with the urges of old-fashioned romanticism. He's also been an important composer of choral music, where his deep religiosity may be more clearly identified than in his instrumental works.
His new Piece for Big Orchestra, premiered in Stockholm last month and brought to the National Concert Hall on Wednesday by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, is one of a series of works identified as "Pieces" in the title. But it's also the work of a composer who has now decided to "shout louder" since he believes "it must be possible to interest people in something other than beautiful minor chords". In the new work he seems to want to trade on the denial of familiar associations of gesture and content. Simple chords and figures linger as strange, scarcely recognisable shadows beneath the often riotous jungle which the piece frequently presents to the listener. The image that came most strongly to mind was of a dancer caught in a frozen moment, showing the conflict between inner motivation and external movement. Sandstrom makes his points repeatedly before trailing off with a gesture of quiet release.
Manfred Honeck and his players handled the often bluntly naive surfaces of Sandstrom's sophisticated creation with confrontational directness. In Haydn's Trumpet Concerto, by contrast, everything was shaped with that loving care for detail which allows a sense of fond lingering without the apparent loss of musical time. Haydn has long been difficult terrain for the modern symphony orchestra.
Honeck's flexibly-sprung rhythmic sense, finely-balanced phrasing, and impeccable responses to the driving thrust of even slight dissonances, brought the music so vividly to life that even the star trumpeter, Hakan Hardenberg, was slightly - and quietly - outshone, in spite of his native brilliance and the ease with which a solo trumpet can dominate an orchestra of classical proportions.
Honeck's handling of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony was everything the first half would have led one to expect - freshly considered, tightly argued (while at the same time rich in individual touches of rubato) and always prepared to wear its heart on its sleeve. The orchestra, which is not as finely polished as some who have visited Dublin in recent years, gave of its all. And in two unfamiliar encores the players showed a svelte, gorgeously-modulated range of string tone that hadn't been called for in the programme proper.
