Johnston, RTÉ NSO / Altschuler

National Concert Hall, Dublin

Borodin

– Prince Igor Overture

Shostakovich

– Cello Concerto No 2

Tchaikovsky

– Symphony No 5

Shostakovich wrote two works for his 60th birthday in 1966. One of them is the short parodistic song, Preface to my Collected Works and a Short Reflection upon this Preface, the other his Second Cello Concerto, written for and premièred by Rostropovich.

The composer’s First Cello Concerto, written for Rostropovich in 1959, was an immediate success. The altogether less extrovert, less combative Second Concerto has never managed to emulate the popularity of the earlier work.

There was something so calm, so wistful about the opening of Guy Johnston’s performance with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra on Friday, that anyone could have been forgiven for wondering where the acid irony of Shostakovich had disappeared to.

Johnston's honeyed tone conveyed the sense of an agreeably self-contained world that comes under assault from outside. There are dramatic intrusions from a violent bass drum, and from those clicking, mechanical percussive riffs that can stray in and out of late Shostakovich like the jogger that turns up in the strangest of places in Alain Resnais's film Providence, and the concerto is also haunted by the Odessa street-song, Bubliki, Kupitye, Bubliki. Johnston's approach, well supported by regular guest conductor Vladimir Altschuler, proved thoroughly viable.

Altschuler was in good form. His handling of the overture to Borodin's incomplete opera Prince IgorOverture (an overture actually composed by Glazunov "roughly according to Borodin's plan") was sweet without being over-sweet.

He also combined hot-blooded music-making and balletic lightness in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and encouraged the members of the NSO to phrasing of surging pulse and firm projection. It was the kind of performance that clearly left the audience wishing for more.