Leonore No 3 Overture - Beethoven
Concerto in E for two pianos - Mendelssohn
Symphony No 1 - Brahms
There was a time when the management of the National Concert Hall used to feel a responsibility for co-operative planning. Not any more, it seems, with last Friday's visit by the symphony orchestra of West German Radio in Cologne placed just after the two nights of the Axa Dublin International Piano Competition finals, in a programme including Brahms's First Symphony just a week before that same work is due from the NSO.
The WDRSO is actually coeval with the NSO and, as you would expect from a German radio orchestra, has a solid track record in the area of contemporary music. Friday's offerings at the NCH, however, were all from the 19th-century, and showed the orchestra and its conductor, Semyon Bychkov, to be very much at home, in different ways, in the worlds of Beethoven and Brahms.
Bychkov handled the third and most celebrated of Beethoven's Leonore overtures with an approach that approximated the finely-detailed mannerisms of the period-performance movement. His Brahms was altogether more heavy-weight, but with its darker colours finely illuminated, its inner tensions beautifully gauged, its momentum carefully sustained.
Given the strange mixture of brightness and opacity to which the NSO now so frequently subjects its audiences, it was good to hear an orchestra where the interplay of the instrumental choirs was so natural and clear, the response to dynamic markings so musically intelligent - the NSO is often these days reduced to the herd instinct of block dynamics.
The least successful item on the Germans' programme was the teenage Mendelssohn's Concerto in E for two pianos. The Labeque sisters played with their customary zippy elan in a piece that seems bound to impress as the work of a 14-year-old genius. But that genius hadn't yet fully appreciated the value of stating his case with economy rather than showy prolixity, and this concerto needs a lot more than fleet-fingered charm to justify its length in performance.
