EIF music reviews: Holst’s The Planets | Roby Lakatos & Ensemble | Mark Simpson & Richard Uttley

MUSIC

Holst’s The Planets

Usher Hall

★★★★★

Put on a big, popular programme and listeners will come. That was the lesson from the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s bold and blazing concert of Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody and Holst’s The Planets, for which the Usher Hall was gratifyingly packed to the rafters with an enthusiastic and appreciative crowd.

Not that these were simply crowd-pleasing performances. Conductor Edward Gardner gave bracing, brisk accounts that showed off the LPO as the towering juggernaut of sonic marvels that it is with hall-shaking bass, gleaming brass and golden, velvety strings.

Italian Beatrice Rana was an explosive soloist in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, occasionally striking the keys so forcefully that she was heard above even the densest orchestral texture, but never compromising on gracefulness and elegance. The famous central slow variation, for example, was tender but crisp, alive with movement and emotion rather than simply a sentimental wallow. And Gardner’s LPO responded with equally brittle, strongly etched playing, sliding organically between variations as the conductor’s sure-headed overall architecture emerged.

Their account of The Planets was generally on the brisk side, but all the more urgent and characterful for that. Mars erupted in noises of terrifying cataclysm, though Gardner kept things carefully controlled, while Mercury scampered nimbly and Jupiter was a tad more athletic than many conductors find him. It was Gardner’s clear-headed, no-nonsense perspective on Holst’s more visionary movements, though, that brought a sense of sharp focus and vivid meaning, in the inexorable tread of a mighty Saturn, or the wisps of sound coalescing in the closing Neptune.

And it wasn’t all well-known warhorses: Gardner and the LPO brought a sense of freshness and new life to Judith Weir’s opening Forest, all tendrils of melody spiralling out across the orchestra’s musicians. It was a concert of immense power and no less subtlety.

DAVID KETTLE

MUSIC

Roby Lakatos & Ensemble

The Hub

★★★★☆

They opened with a flourish of violin and the wire-strung clamour of cimbalom and ended with a high-velocity jazz jam. Hungarian violin virtuoso Roby Lakatos led his sextet through a near-continuous flow of repertoire that ranged from the frenetic to the unashamedly romantic.

With two violins, piano, guitar, double bass and cimbalom – the big Hungarian hammer dulcimer – the ensemble proved powerful in full flight, yet able to change tempo on a sixpence, while Lakatos, an amiable, moustachioed figure who can boast distinguished Romani musical lineage, peregrinated around the stage, virtually serenading the beanbaggers in the front row.

He’s a master of the extravagant flourish, whether deploying rich-toned bowing or a formidable pizzicato technique that made his instrument ring like a mandolin. When not in full exhilarating flight, twin violins flickering, his ensemble had their schmaltzy way with Broadway material such as Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof, while a snappy-swingy Deux Gitare tipped the hat to Reinhardt and Grappelli.

Show-stoppers were the csárdás, rhapsodic preludes giving way to alternating high-stepping slow passages and all-out attack. Excitement intensified when they were joined unexpectedly by Wynton Marsalis, whose rapid-fire trumpet sparred with Lakatos’s violin in a heady Hungarian take on Cherokee.

JIM GILCHRIST

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MUSIC

Mark Simpson & Richard Uttley

Queen’s Hall

★★★★☆

“It’s about four minutes long, and it’s really hard,” quipped clarinettist/composer Mark Simpson about his own piece Lov(escape), which opened the second half of his blazing EIF recital with pianist Richard Uttley. He wasn’t wrong: it was an unapologetic showpiece that he wrote for his own semi-final recital as part of the 2006 BBC Young Musicians contest. And its characteristic mix of frenzied, breathless energy, screaming intensity and heart-on-sleeve emotion just about summed up the overall tone of Simpson’s concert.

He’s a larger-than-life figure in his sometimes over-the-top music, and he carried over his search for emotional extremes into the brief pieces by contemporary composers that opened both parts of his recital. Among them, Sir James MacMillan’s classic After the Tryst got a deeply passionate account, and Zoë Martlew’s fire purification ritual of a classical piece Pyrrhos surged with appropriately incandescent energy.

Ayrshire-born Jay Capperauld packed weighty emotions into his brief So My Tears Flow, and Simpson and Uttley responded with an account in which every note was deeply felt, every gesture meant. Simpson closed both halves of his concert with one of Brahms’s two clarinet sonatas, in which he toned down his exuberant, forcefully projected playing, but not by much. An exhilarating recital, but an exhausting one too.

DAVID KETTLE

READ MORE: When Nicola Benedetti met Wynton Marsalis