![The Prague Symphony Orchestra with Tomáš Brauner conducting.](https://media.guim.co.uk/b2b57010ae50767fe851e86689ef6ba89aa6a4be/320_256_7040_4224/1000.jpg)
It’s just over five years since the Prague Symphony Orchestra last visited Britain and, given the relative paucity of European orchestras venturing here these days, this return tour of seven concert dates and an eighth in Dublin is welcome.
Their programmes differ in each venue, but Dvořák – being in their blood – is featured in all of them and this Bristol performance opened with his tone poem Noonday Witch, written on the composer’s return from America. The mood-painting, with its contrast of village rurality and the sinister spookiness of the witch – invoked by a mother to make her naughty child behave, but only bringing tragedy – was beautifully realised. Chief conductor Tomáš Brauner ensured authentic colouring both for the folk-like Bohemian lilt and the elements of symphonic drama.
Gabriela Montero was the soloist in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and, if there was a connection with the Prague musicians, perhaps it was that last year the Venezuelan pianist was awarded the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. She certainly imposed her outgoing, outspoken personality on the work, enjoying the exchanges with the fluent wind players. Prokofiev wrote the concerto for himself, and Montero – who has also recently composed and premiered her own concerto – made light of the huge technical demands, while reminding one that the piano is a percussion instrument, weighting the bass with particularly emphatic force. By way of encore, Montero improvised in her now trademark style, riffing on the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony as suggested by an audience member, beginning in baroque style and disarmingly slipping into Latin-American dance mode.
After the interval came Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, dating less than two decades later than the Prokofiev and, in its biting dancing moments, occasionally echoing him. It was the central slow largo, conveying a landscape of physical and mental desolation, that came over most expressively, details of instrumentation emerging with clarity, not least the sweet irony of the celesta in its closing bars. The finale’s compelling and insistent energy, convincingly achieved with the PSO’s blazing brass, should have been enough to end on: as it was, the extra piece of unidentified schmaltzy Viennoiserie somehow sat ill with all that had gone before.
• Appearing in Norwich, 9 February; Nottingham 11 February; Basingstoke 13 February; Manchester 14 February
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