★★★★☆
The programme booklet was labelled Fireworks and Fantasies, but this also became a BBC Symphony Orchestra concert about youth and old age. Youth burst on stage with Alexander Malofeev, the 22 year-old Russian blond bombshell, who perched on his piano stool as if about to fall off, but never lost control of his flexible wrists and spidery fingers, restlessly scuttling over the keys in the torrents of notes required for Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 3.
Fireworks indeed, and the audience at the end stood up and cheered. Malofeev was certainly good, although co-ordination with the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu and the orchestra occasionally proved rocky — a built-in problem with Prokofiev’s mercurial creation. At one point Lintu’s baton movements suggested he was swatting flies. Actually, I was more impressed by our soloist in poetic mode, limpid and dreamy, in the second movement’s quieter variations. Once past a false start, there was also plenty to enjoy in his carefully controlled encore, a transcription of the Pas de Deux from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. One thing is clear: Malofeev is going places.
Two weeks away from turning 90, the British-born composer Bernard Rands, long in America, wasn’t physically present for the Covid-delayed British premiere of his Symphonic Fantasy, co-commissioned by the BBC. But we certainly felt the wisdom of old age in the work’s confident manipulation of multiple motifs spread over a 20-minute span. Textures and figurations seemed to change every two bars, whooshing and slithering here, stabbing with tremulous chords there, with everything from woodwind tendrils to tubular bells shooting up through any spaces in between. Rands’s admitted structural model was the terse argument of Sibelius’s constantly mutating Seventh Symphony, but his intriguing and ear-tickling creation, both exuberant and sober, certainly didn’t reflect Sibelius’s Nordic sound world.
Orchestral colourings and activity speeds grew more hectic still after the interval when Stravinsky’s symphonic poem Song of the Nightingale glittered and beguiled. Lintu and the orchestra were here at their best, full of flair yet impeccably precise. The concert’s finale, John Adams’s Slonimsky’s Earbox, offered much the same mix, but with less substance. Even so, I trotted out rejuvenated.
On BBC Sounds
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