A serious illness and major surgery has prevented Kurt Masur from conducting in London since last September. His return was a splashy affair - a grand concert to commemorate his 75th birthday, complete with a glitterati audience and tributes in the programme from, among others, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder. It also included the world premiere of Sur le Même Accord, a nocturne for violin and orchestra by Henri Dutilleux, the most recent of a long line of composers to have been inspired by the glamorous Anne-Sophie Mutter.
As its title suggests, Sur le Même Accord rings ceaseless changes on a single chord, its six notes first picked out pizzicato by Mutter before it pervades the orchestra as a deep, penumbral drone. What follows is a weirdly allusive phantasmagoria, part dream, part nightmare. As Mutter's filigree cadenzas, initially skittish, become increasingly nervy as they first confront slippery descending woodwind phrases that sound as if they have strayed from Berg's Lulu, then come up against the manic clarinet trills from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. As always with Dutilleux, the ambivalently beautiful sonorities are remarkable. The piece provides a fine showcase for Mutter's talents, with plenty of those famously sweet high notes in evidence. At nine minutes, however, it is on the short side, while the ending - a deliberately inconclusive halt mid-phrase - seems oddly perfunctory.
The work was prefaced by Beethoven's Two Romances, graciously conducted by Masur, though they exposed the down side in Mutter's playing - an absence of tonal weight and more than occasional problems with pitch. After the interval, Masur and the LPO were left to their own devices for Debussy's La Mer and Ravel's La Valse. Masur probed Debussy's seascape with lingering fondness, often dawdling over the sonorities at the expense of propulsion. Ravel's great tone poem uses an out-of-control Viennese waltz as a metaphor for imploding imperial culture. It was gloriously played, though Masur took it by fits and starts, rather than allowing it to escalate towards its final apocalyptic crunch. He has done the work better on previous occasions. Masur may be back, which in itself is something to be grateful for, but he is not yet back at the height of his powers.
