Much of the best - and a little of the worst - of Maxim Vengerov was in evidence on this occasion. Despite the presence of the English Chamber Orchestra and the Israeli conductor Vag Papian, this was very much a one-man show, and although Vengerov exuded bags of charisma and his usual self-effacing charm, one couldn't quite help wondering if an ego had landed.
The concert certainly formed an effective showcase for his formidable talents. He played the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Papian conducting,and after the interval took the baton himself in a performance of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. For all his enthusiasm and exuberance - he twirls around on the podium with balletic grace and tangible glee - that was perhaps an unwise move. He's a plausible conductor, though not a great one, and the symphony took an awfully long time to get going. Much of the time, he aspires to the kind of spaciousness one primarily associates with Klemperer's Mozart, though with little of the latter's emotional depth and resonance. The first movement was sluggish and the Andante dawdled. When we got to the Minuet, however, Vengerov suddenly struck form, shading it towards a waltz and infusing it with an infectious, unashamed Viennese lilt. The finale had a certain magisterial elan, without quite scaling the heights of elation that the greatest interpreters bring to the work.
He's better off as a violinist, in short, and his performance of the Beethoven was, in its way, stunning. Rarely, I suspect, has this most noble of concertos been played with such perfection of technique and such lacerating sweetness of tone, its long, rapt phrases seeming alternately to hover and swoop seraphically in the air. Interpretatively he plays safe, refusing, on occasion, to sacrifice beauty of sound for emotional danger. There's no self-conscious showing off, even though the cadenzas - his own - are filthily difficult. The first, a massive triple-stopped variant on the opening movement's second subject, veers closer to Brahms than Beethoven and breaks the mood a bit. The second is an exhilarating cascade of tone. Papian's conducts with violent, emphatic gestures, not always securing a comparable emotional response from the ECO, whose playing was muted on occasion.
When it was over, Vengerov returned to the platform clutching a Baroque violin rather than his Strad, and gave us the Adagio from Bach's G Minor Sonata as an encore, probing it rhapsodically rather than opting for a stiff formality of approach. The audience held its breath in wonder, then went wild.
