Hungarian Dances 1,10, 6 & 5 - Brahms

Violin Concerto - Dvorak

Concerto for Orchestra - Bartok

Alexander Anissimov, now conductor emeritus of the National Symphony Orchestra, gave his first concert in his new role at the National Concert Hall on Friday.

It was a nice idea to open the concert with five of Brahms's Hungarian Dances, evergreen works which these days, when played by full symphony orchestras, usually turn up at the other end of an evening, with the encores.

Anissimov gave his selection in a string-rich presentation that was lush and full-bodied. The sound was impressive, but not as persuasive as it would have been with a touch more flair and a brush or two of the excitement of absolute exactitude in the more excitable sections.

With a few notable exceptions (the trumpets, in particular), that exactitude was a lot more evident in Bart≤k's late Concerto for Orchestra, a work which, with the Third Piano Concerto, helped the composer's work enter the core of the orchestral repertoire. There was some excellent detailing from the flutes at the opening, and the close of the central Elegia was hauntingly done.

Often, however, in spite of fine playing, the expressive results were rather too generalised. Anissimov chose to create a sound-world that, to make a physical analogy, seemed almost too corpulent to match all the finer contours of Bart≤k's writing. There is a lot more of light and shade in this music than Friday's performance revealed.

Sasha Rozhdestvensky, the soloist in Dvorak's Violin Concerto, took the evening's sense of striving after but not quite reaching goals of intense expression a lot further. He made it sound like hard and stressful work, and the sense of struggle was intensified by a liberal use of portamento, which came across as every bit as empty a mannerism as the sobbing of Italianate tenors.