We see too little of the Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in London nowadays. His two concerts with the Philharmonia at the Festival Hall this week - the second, next Sunday, will include the premiere of Colin Matthews's Horn Concerto - are a measly season's ration.
Salonen's account of Mahler's First Symphony on Tuesday night was a vivid reminder of what we have been missing. This was a performance of wonderful flexibility and sweep, which managed to encompass all the extremes of this teeming work. Though the tempi were on the fast side - the main "Wayfaring" theme of the first movement strutted proudly, the scherzo had a perfect fleetness - there was never a sense of unnecessary haste. The wide-spaced textures of the introduction had all the air they needed, and the macabre inventions of the funeral march were never allowed to be merely grotesque. The space Salonen found for the slow episode in the finale, and the purified tone the Philharmonia produced for it, were heart-stopping, while the symphony's ultimate entrance into D major was genuinely triumphant.
The first half, Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, had been less convincing. The programme notes described the piece as one of the finest of the 20th century, "alongside the Berg, Elgar and Walton" (even allowing for a bit of British bias, the Sibelius and the Bartok might have got a mention too). But it is fundamentally an introspective and unyielding work, and Viktoria Mullova's performance needed much more commitment and vitality to make it truly engaging.
There were some serenely beautiful things, especially in the opening Nocturne, but too often she substituted solemnity for seriousness. The performance really only caught fire when Salonen took the music by the scruff of its neck in the second movement. The occasional twinge of sour tuning apart, it was technically first rate - but that one takes for granted with Mullova. What was absent was her usual fire, and her usual insights.
• A version of this review ran in later editions of yesterday's paper.
