The program was standard-issue: the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s opera “Peter Grimes,” Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Holst’s mammoth suite “The Planets” — British composers, all. There is, in an era of thoroughly internationalized ensembles, something quaint and a little silly about the notion of touring with your country’s repertory.
Particularly when the works are, like these, chestnuts done all the time. I endorse British ensembles advocating British music, but “The Planets” is hardly in need of advocacy, and the Royal Philharmonic, for all its liveliness, didn’t sound in it much different than, say, the New York Philharmonic would have. The number of orchestras with actual sonic or interpretive idiosyncrasies in music of their compatriots is by now almost or actually zero.
But with Petrenko a tall, animated presence on the podium — bouncing up and down, shimmying, and hypnotically curling the long fingers of his left hand, witchlike — it was a pleasant evening. From the Britten on, the orchestra’s winds and brasses were particularly mellow and secure, sounding dewy in Holst’s “Venus” and adding to the bronzed ominousness of “Saturn” and the sensual hush of “Neptune,” which also featured the offstage voices of Musica Sacra, under Kent Tritle.
The cellist Kian Soltani, the soloist in the Elgar, played with buttery understatement and intimacy, and considerable wit in the Lento. It speaks to his collegiality that his encore included five of the orchestra’s cellists in his arrangement of an excerpt from Shostakovich’s film score for “The Gadfly.” At the end of the concert, the full ensemble’s encore also abandoned Britain for Russia, with a cheerful rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Tumblers” from “The Snow Maiden.”
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Performed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan.
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