Music
RSNO
Kulturpalast, Dresden
Keith Bruce, four stars
THE culmination of the national orchestra’s breathless week in Europe was also the closing weekend of Dresdner Musikfestspiele, to which it had been invited by the festival’s Intendant Jan Vogler at the end of the celllist’s season as the RSNO’s artist in residence. Absenting himself from the platform, that made the concert a combination of all the Bs: Britten’s Sea Interludes, Benedetti playing Bernstein, and the fixture of Brahms 4.
The locals around my seat clearly found the cross rhythms of Britten’s Sunday Morning a novelty they were unsure about, but took instantly to Nicola Benedetti and the tone-poem-with-soloist that is Serenade after Plato’s Symposium, with the orchestra’s percussion section on sparkling form and real drive from the strings in the final “Socrates” movement.
On the previous evening in Ljubljana’s Cankarjev Dom, the conductor Peter Oundjian and the orchestra had given the finest tour performance of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Vogler, Benedetti and pianist Martin Stadtfeld, and followed it with the best-balanced and most propulsive rendition of the Brahms. Principal Chris Gough’s five-player horn section is key to the success of the symphony and it was on top form again in Germany on Sunday evening, even if the totality of the performance was not quite as brisk and flowing as it had been on the previous night.
There was still plenty time at the end of both of the weekend’s concerts for both of the tour’s encores, and Khachaturian’s Waltz from Masquerade and Fahey’s Eightsome Reels hit the target squarely on each occasion. When the players are in their party-piece mode, there is no great distance between the orchestra and the traditional jazz bands that had drawn a huge crowd to the banks of the Elbe when they paraded past the pleasure-palace paddle-steamers earlier in the day.
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