New York-born conductor Marin Alsop made such a mark on London audiences last year with her performances of contemporary music, that one wondered just what she might be like in the mainstream repertoire. Thanks to the LPO, we had the chance to find out - and the results can only be described as very impressive.
This was one of the Audience Request concerts with which the LPO has been packing the Festival Hall of late. One item in the programme is elected by the public via a ballot form sent in with ticket applications. On this occasion it was a violin concerto which was up for grabs, with a choice between the teenage Strauss's Concerto in D (sketched in his maths book when he was bored at school) and Bruch's ever-popular First - which won hands down.
Alsop and the Dutch violinist Isabelle Van Keulen strode onto the platform, and proceeded to deliver the finest performance of the piece that I've heard. The whole thing was much more intense than usual. Alsop, taking it slowly, emphasises brooding orchestral colours that you don't normally notice. Van Keulen, subordinating flamboyance to drama and employing a velvety-rich, sensual tone throughout, really lets the music live, breathe and sing.
Alsop also showed her prowess in works by Brahms and Tchaikovsky, with varying impact. Tchaikovsky's Hamlet is a peculiar piece which has less to do with Shakespeare than with the composer's own tendency to depression. It shirks the play's Oedipal implications, jettisoning Claudius, Gertrude and Polonius altogether and focusing on Hamlet's tormented psyche, interwoven with portraits of his spectral papa, Ophelia and, oddly, Fortinbras. Alsop pitches it a fraction too high, opening in an atmosphere of such near-hysteria that she comes dangerously close, in places, to going over the top. On the other hand, there are fabulously unnerving insights. The way she stresses the grotesque twisting of Ophelia's theme as her image distorts in Hamlet's mind was particularly telling.
No qualms about Alsop's Brahms, though. She got the balance of elements in his First Symphony absolutely right, instilling a remarkable cogency and homogeneity of mood into a work which can sometimes seem an episodic collection of movements rather than an integrated whole. The LPO were superlative here, too. In an era when great Brahms interpreters are a bit thin of the ground, Alsop is well on her way to becoming one of the best.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
