"Making sparks fly" is the slogan for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's current season. Whether this is an apt motto for an orchestra that has just appointed the austere Kurt Masur as its principal conductor remains to be seen. The sparks did fly on this occasion, when Roger Norrington appeared as guest conductor in a concert with Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto as its centrepiece. Emanuel Ax was the soloist. A certain disparity in approach was apparent between the two, and the performance caused enough controversy for heated arguments to be heard all over the foyer in the interval.
As might be expected, Norrington brought elements of period performance practice to bear. Ax plays from the centre of the orchestra, facing the audience head on, and with the piano lid removed. Norrington conducts from the piano's crook, propping his score on the keyboard lid. Therefore we see Ax's face throughout, and occasionally he looked somewhat uneasy.
The lyricism for which Ax is justly famous was at times replaced by a spiky pointillism that aspired to a fierce intensity. Norrington, meanwhile, was all reined-in restraint, and there were moments when you felt that Ax was like an animal straining at the leash. Occasionally, he let rip with sudden violence, hammering home the cadenzas while Norrington hovered beside him, hand on hip, in an attitude that suggested both nonchalant informality and a certain arrogance. It all worked extremely well, largely because the concerto is about opposition, with orchestra and soloist alternately facing each other across the musical gulf that separates them and attempting to bridge it. "Orpheus taming the Furies" was how Liszt described the slow movement, though here it sounded more like a duel. Ax's final arpeggio, far from fusing with the orchestral texture, soared above it in coruscating triumph.
After the interval, Norrington plunged into Elgar. The First Symphony still divides opinion. Many see it as an inherently tragic work that contains premonitions of the cataclysm of the first world war. I dislike it intensely, and have never heard it as anything other than a combination of relentless imperialism with a nostalgic, bourgeois hankering after the British pastoral tradition. Norrington didn't make me change my mind, though his performance was, unquestionably, tremendous, with Elgar's debt to Wagner played up for once (lots of echoes of Tristan, Lohengrin and Parsifal), and the contrasts between overwhelming grandeur and diaphanous textures perfectly judged. The LPO were superb throughout.
