NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★☆☆
The National Symphony Orchestra held its 75th Anniversary Celebration concert at the National Concert Hall on Friday, with a repeat in Waterford the following day. The occasion was to have seen the Irish debut of Jonathan Heyward, who last July, at the age of 29, was announced as the first person of colour to become music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Due to his indisposition the orchestra replaced him with Lio Kuokman, who is programme director of the Macau International Music Festival and resident conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.
Kuokman conducted the original programme without change, opening with a work by the Polish composer and violinist Grażyna Bacewicz (1909-69), whose training included stints with two hugely influential teachers, Nadia Boulanger and Carl Flesch. Her busy, neoclassical Overture from 1943 sounded less than ideally purposeful in Kuokman’s hands, and a little on the bland side.
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The Italian violinist Francesca Dego, whose husband, Daniele Rustioni, is music director of the Ulster Orchestra, was the soloist in the 19-year-old Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 5. Her delivery was fine-grained and tasteful, and she negotiated the composer’s writing and her own embellished passages with ease. Kuokman was a less than sympathetic partner. Too much in his heavier approach just didn’t gel with the soloist in terms of ensemble, balance and musical style. The two seemed most at one in the Turkish inflections of the finale, where Dego raised the temperature with some headlong virtuosity.
Her single encore, Bacewicz’s Polish Caprice, jumped forward more than 150 years from Mozart for a sensual, dancing, folksy display of spot-on showmanship. The audience greeted it with delight.
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Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony is one of the Czech composer’s most cheerful works. Kuokman’s approach was a little too driven, too concerned with emphasis and highlighting to convey enough of the geniality and lyricism that are so characteristic of this work. His was a very one-sided and insistent view.
Nothing much needs to be said about the fact that an orchestra that is a national cultural institution, performing in a venue that is itself a national cultural institution (under whose remit the orchestra was placed last year), chose to put on a 75th-birthday concert without the involvement of an Irish composer, soloist or conductor. The shameful facts speak for themselves. I just can’t see that being allowed to happen in any other art form.
