There was a full house for the loudest of this season’s concerts and with the largest orchestra.
For the first part of the concert the five movements of Dvorák’s Serenade for Strings sensitively but crisply showed why this is one of the composer’s best known works. Unusually for the Orchestra nowadays the double bass players were to the right and this gave more room for the other strings.
After the interval the stage and the some of the staging above was full to capacity to give a super sized orchestra to play the longest of Shostakovich’s symphonies. Called Leningrad because it was written whilst the city was under siege in 1941 from an invading Nazi German army. Constantly on the move, the music goes from very loud to surprisingly soft and back, many a time. It is a monumental work and the audience watched and listened with gripped and enthused attention. Part of the fascination was the control of such a complicated undertaking by Neeme Järvi.
At the end, after almost eighty minutes, the relief and joy on the players’ faces as they savoured the moment with their conductor was fair testament to a great performance. The applause showed that the audience agreed. Not surprisingly BBC Radio 3 had decided this was a concert to broadcast. The concert goes out on Monday 28 March at 7pm.
Neeme Järvi is a firm favourite going back to the four years, 1984 to 1988, when he was the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor. And even before, in 1980, as a guest conductor, as we learned from John Cushing’s inspired lecture beforehand.
John has been a clarinet playing member of the Orchestra since 1978. He told us of his fond memories of a younger Neeme Järvi recently over here from Estonia and Russia with only a smattering of English. The Orchestra’s Assistant Conductor, Christian Kluxen, added his description of the Neeme Järvi master class he had attended only a few years ago.
Event
Friday 25 March 2011, 7.30pm