Leeds town hall is an imposing hunk of civic architecture, yet for musical purposes this didactic riot of whimsical Victorian plasterwork makes you feel as if you are perched round the tiers of a wedding cake, listening to sounds escape from the bottom of a bucket. This, however, was the stage on which Artur Pizarro and Martyn Brabbins launched their careers in the Leeds Piano and Conductor's Competitions respectively. Here they reunite with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for Rachmaninov, a composer with whom the duo have a proven track record and an acclaimed recording of the Third Piano Concerto under their belt.
This evening, however, they perform the runt of Rachmaninov's litter, the Fourth, a glib example of the years in which the composer emigrated to the US but left his muse behind in Russia. Some scholars argue that the work elaborates on themes developed before the Atlantic crossing but, even so, Rachmaninov was scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas he had not previousy expressed more eloquently.
The bathos of the work is almost comic - 20 tortuous, bombastic minutes groping for a theme and when it finally arrives it's Three Blind Mice. Pizarro is a sensitive, fluid technician, but hearing him build up to the big nursery rhyme is like watching a top chef psyching himself up to make an omelette.
Brabbins is many people's first call to unpick a knotty piece of contemporary music, and he instinctively approaches a work as over-familiar as Elgar's First Symphony as if it were hot off the press. Brabbins is less interested in Elgar the windy rhetorician than the complex, private tone colourist: an approach better suited to teasing whispers from the strings in the introspective third movement than cueing blasts from the brass in the tub-thumping finale.
These days, when it is all but impossible for a new work to prove itself with a second or third hearing, it is astonishing to consider that Elgar's First Symphony received 82 performances in the year after its premiere alone. But Brabbins still provides the one-shot intensity of a performance that might never be heard again.
