Compared with most opening announcements, this was dramatic: the previous morning the pianist Paul Lewis, due to be the soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, had been hit by a car. Happily he’s expected to make a quick recovery. And the Beethoven went ahead, with Boris Giltburg as a luxury stand-in.
This reunited Giltburg and the conductor Vasily Petrenko, who have recorded all Beethoven’s piano concertos together, and their familiarity smoothed the way to a more polished performance than the circumstances might have suggested. Giltburg, characteristically, played with firm delicacy, dovetailing nicely with the warm-toned orchestra. He threw in the odd thunderous moment but tended more towards understatement, as in the haunting music-box passage of the first movement and the hushed transition to the finale. In that movement he struck a fine balance of grace and exuberance; but his encore, Schumann’s Arabeske in C, seemed calibrated to a more intimate level, Giltburg’s introspective playing making us lean in and listen.
This was the first in the RPO’s Lights in the Dark series, spotlighting music written by men and women at odds with their societies. As Petrenko explained in an informal introduction, Vienna before the first world war was not kind to Alban Berg, but his Three Pieces for Orchestra got a persuasive performance, their mechanical rhythms precisely played, their elusive melodic lines lovingly shaped. The audience in the choir stalls behind the orchestra craned their necks to get a look at the player thumping a huge mallet on to a wooden box to create Berg’s hammer blows of fate – a noisy effect, yes, but not overdone here.
In Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which formed the concert’s climax, there was something striking in the care taken to enunciate each wind solo – not just the eloquent opening bassoon but the burbling bass clarinet, the velvety alto flute and more. The music didn’t quite threaten to spiral out of control, yet it was an exhilarating performance – a showcase for an orchestra on top form. Petrenko has had a galvanising effect on the RPO since taking over, three seasons ago: long may that continue.
• The RPO’s Lights in the Dark season continues until June.
