Magic Flute Overture - Mozart
Triple Concerto - Beethoven
Sheherazade - Rimsky-Korsakov
Of all the programmes Alexander Anissimov has conducted this season, none was better calculated to show his specific musical strengths and weaknesses than last Friday's.
Mozart's Magic Flute Overture was portentously overweight, heavy with the rhetoric of a later era. Anissimov's Beethoven suffers from some of these deficiencies, too, heightened in this particular concerto by the chamber music style of the Moscow Piano Trio. The concerto, after all, is rightly known as the Triple Concerto rather than the Concerto for Piano Trio. That said, there was much to enjoy in the solo contributions, and the pianist, Alexander Bon duryansky, was on particularly fine form.
The change in the musicmaking after the interval was so great it would have been easy to imagine you were listening to a different conductor and orchestra. In Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade, the woolliness of the first half was replaced by focus that was sharp and colours that were distinct.
Anissimov's expansiveness did make some of the slower passages unnecessarily slack, so that the narrative lost its grip. But the demanding solo passages were all strongly done, and the perfumed magic of Rimsky's orchestral re sourcefulness frequently exerted its expected charm.
The Irish Times/NSO tour brings this programme to Gal- way tomorrow, Limerick on Wednesday, Cork on Thursday and Waterford on Friday.
