Benjamin Zander is an academic and conductor whose work combines intellect with instinct, and emotion with insight. Born and trained in Britain, he later gravitated to the United States, becoming professor of music in Boston, where an orchestra, the Boston Philharmonic, was founded especially for him in 1978.
Now a regular guest with the Philharmonia, his programmes are often constructed along intellectual or contextual lines. Earlier this year he combined Johann Strauss with Mahler to present a portrait of imperial Vienna in terminal decline. On this occasion, wedging Elgar's Cello Concerto between Beethoven's Coriolan and the Eroica, he examined images of pride and collapse, heroism and failure, violence and its aftermath.
His Coriolan is a disturbing portrait of the hero as mother-fixated psychopath. The opening monotone, riddled with angst, is a terrifying call to attention, and the crashing chords that follow it are like a lash from a whip. Thereafter the first theme rears upward in savage defiance and hauteur until the second subject suddenly stops it in it tracks. Zander infuses this great melody - suggestive of Volumnia's influence on her son - with a combination of patrician dignity and manipulative wheedling, while the string arpeggios churning beneath it mingle resentment with fear. The ending, in which both Coriolan and his music fall apart in seconds, is a shocking depiction of complete psychological disintegration.
Zander's Eroica is equally intense and exploratory. There's no forced solemnity. Heroism here is purchased at a price which is sometimes sinister. The first movement swings into action with confident elation, then plunges into uncertainty and despair before genuine nobility is attained. The Funeral March progresses with a rigid, heavy tread, in which collective mourning collides with intimations of a colossal military machine moving relentlessly forward. The horns of the Trio whoop with edgily bucolic abandon, as if the fruits of the hero's labour are transitory at best.
Yet Zander's approach can sometimes lead to variability as the Elgar concerto proved. He steers the work away from intimacy towards an epic with results that are impressive, but rarely moving. A couple of moments of suspect intonation apart, Alexander Baillie played with rapt, lyrical fervour, but the whole came over as very much an expression of public grief at the demise of empire, rather than a depiction of one man's private despair at the horror and waste of the first world war - and I'm not convinced that that's what Elgar's concerto is really about.
