REVIEW: Philharmonia Orchestra, The Anvil, Basingstoke

FOR some as yet undiscovered reason, Russia’s composers have always had an exclusive hotline to our hearts.

No nation’s artists have burrowed quite so deep into the human experience, and certainly no country’s musical tradition has been quite such a byword for raw, unfiltered emotion.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky knew better than most how to turn his own furious passions into gripping melody, a talent made clear by the Philharmonia orchestra and Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare in a performance opening The Anvil’s 2015/16 International Concert Series.

Tchaikovsky worked on his Fantasy Overture from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for years, chopping and changing it substantially in a way that will surprise anyone charmed by its flowing spontaneity.

At its most driving and determined, this music seethes lost love, as though the composer has us by the lapels in a frenzy of heartbroken drunkenness and won’t for anything let us go until we’ve heard his desperate story.

Payare and the Philharmonia were alive in these moments in a way that eluded them in the quieter, more atmospheric passages; a performance half brilliant and half pedestrian.

They also relished the excitement of Modest Mussorgsky’s tour of the Pictures at an Exhibition, whose piano original was here given in the brilliant orchestration by Ravel.

Mussorgsky, one of Russia’s most temperamentally inspired of musical geniuses, really did spend a lot of his time drunk, though managed enough sobriety to paint these musical pictures with clarity and colour.

The real event here, though, was a double helping of Rachmaninov from one of the world’s star pianists, Daniil Trifonov.

Since winning the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition in 2011, Trifonov has spent his time proving to the concert-going world why he deserved such an accolade.

There could have been no doubters after the evening’s performances of some of Rachmaninov’s least and most heard pieces, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the ever-popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

It would be difficult to imagine a better or more committed performance of the Fourth Concerto than Trifonov gave here. Its shortcomings were all there, though: disjointed and rambling, it doesn’t even have any of the decent tunes for which Rachmaninov was known.

The composer was never satisfied with it, but he had good reason to be content with the Paganini Rhapsody, a musical flight of fancy that begins with a famous melody by the eponymous 19th Century virtuoso violinist.

Here were all the shades and pianistic colours one could ever wish to hear, a tremendous advert for Trifonov’s stupendous talent and for the calibre of stars to grace The Anvil stage.

Andrew Morris