{TABLE} Tallis Fantasia .......... Vaughan Williams Piano Concerto No 2 ...... Beethoven Symphony No 1 ............ Walton {/TABLE} THE final concert of the National Symphony Orchestra's subscription given at the National Concert Hall last night, had an English, flavour.
Yet, in spite of the of a conductor, Adrian Leaper, well versed in ways of English music, there was little sense of idiomatic response to the well known pieces by Vaughan Williams' and Walton.
Leaper's approach to Walton's First Symphony (which, incidentally was conducted at its premiere by an Irishman, Hamilton Harty) was urgent, often to the point of sounding pressured and rushed.
The urgency worked to create a forcefulness of declamation as if the composer's purpose had been to fabricate some sort of neo Tchaikovskian portentousness.
The conductor countenanced little in the way of clarity of argument, and happily sacrificed longer term cogency and continuity to momentary point making.
In Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto, the soloist, Hugh Tinney, seemed to be aiming for a reading of classical proportion, backward looking, as it were, in relation to Beethoven's output as a whole. Leaper took a gruffer view, rather more concerned to represent the facets of Beethoven that would be more in evidence in his later music. My head sympathised with the pianist, my heart with the conductor, but both would have been happier if the grounds of stylistic agreement had been broader.
It was good to hear the strings of the NSO at the opening of the concert in Vaughan Williams's early Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tall is for some reason, the programme planners at RTE seem unwilling to explore the string repertoire in the context of symphony concerts.
Welcome as the departure was, on this occasion the conductor didn't quite manage to secure sufficient unanimity of phrasing or realise fully the particularly haunting atmosphere which has made this work so well loved.
