ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA AT THE CORN EXCHANGE
Dynamic Domingo Hindoyan from Venezuela conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra spread out across the stage is quite a sight. All together they are dazzling. Rows of ridiculously large double basses range in polished conker brown and behind them the bright complexity of French horns, bassoons, trumpets and to the left flank a bank of violins, dozens of dedicated musicians all at the top of their own specialty tree - and all ready to roll. It does seem improbable that on a dank February weeknight, they should all assemble to do their top of the range stuff in the unflashy interior of the Corn Exchange. Yet there they were spirited youthful talented and about to put on a performance that most audience members would remember forever.
The opener - Glinka’s Overture: Life for the Tsar let us get a look at our conductor the glamorous Domingo Hindoyan, from Caracas Venezuela, a scion of the famously vibrant El Systema. Noted. He brought the thrilling verve of that outfit right into the centre of the RPO. No wonder they were off to a flying start, the man is physically dynamic, musically on it and massively compelling.
Then musical maestro Leon McCawley took to the stage. He has international prizes galore, the Leeds International Piano Competition and first prize in the Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna. They don’t come much classier, and McCawley performed Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in all its profound lyricism. It is a miracle Beethoven could bear to look at a piano at all, his tutor was his alcoholic father who dragged him out of bed as a seven-year-old child and made him play. Neighbours heard the poor child sob as he sat on his small bench ,forced to practice into the small hours. Yet he went on to conquer the instrument that had given him such pain and Leon McCawley gave us the first piano concerto full of his quirky neologisms and quixotic surprises. It is lovely; expressive melodic – and just as you think it’s over Beethoven brings on a shuddering finale to blast the listener (in my case at least) out of her seat.
But it was the concert’s second half that showed us just what an orchestra is meant to be about. No backsliding for any player in the breathtaking Symphony Number 5 by Tchaikovsky. We all think we know this composer – but this orchestra’s full on rendition of the masterpiece of a symphony had everyone in the auditorium rapt. The energy of Domingo Hindoyan was in the air. No wonder El Sytema shook the world. He brings the kind of emotional oomph seldom found in any large-scale production. Controlled yes, but what pizzazz and soaring melodic grace, all there in the score.
In 1888 Tchaikovsky had been on a Europe wide tour and met almost all the great composers of the age, the older Brahms, Richard Strauss and the young modernists Dvorak and Grieg. On his return to Russia, he went off to his summer residence and broke a ten year long drought of inspiration with this stunning symphony. As he feared, the Russian audience hated it and poor Tchaikovsky lapsed into gloom. But once it came to Germany, audiences were ecstatic. No wonder. It is full of meaning for Tchaikovsky’s own emotional path. He hints in the first Andante at his tormented homosexuality, a feeling of conflict that followed him all his life. Yet it is a mixed message Andante con anima, lively with feeling, a mood that the orchestra conveyed with a joyous style. In the second movement lies one of the composer’s most moving love songs, lyrical and lovely French horn features whilst the third is packed with waltzes and minuets from his ballets. By the end the major key asserts a triumph, the disturbance and anxiety overcome.
Over the years, strains of this Symphony have haunted most of us, in the background in snatches. To hear it played with so much energy and élan by an orchestra who must surely claim to be one of the world’s very best powered by a conductor who, as the man next to me remarked at the end ‘got all the juice out of them’ - was a memorable experience.
