Cambridge Philharmonic Society
West Road Concert Hall
Sunday 19th October 2008

TWO TREATS OUT OF THREE FOR YOURS TRULY

The concert season is upon us again; and it has certainly started off with some promising bangs. Lucky Cambridge! When did the city last experience the brilliance and musicianship of three BBC Young Musicians of varying recent years almost on consecutive nights, I wonder.

As things turned out I couldn’t complete the hat-trick, but I was able to get to hear two of them: clarinettist Mark Simpson with the Cambridge Philharmonic at West Road and pianist Freddy Kempf with the Moscow Philharmonic before a full house at the Corn Exchange two days later. I am told that I missed a musical treat by not being able to make the third, Tom Poster.

The Cambridge Phil’s choice of programme was unusual: two Romantic blockbusters and one up-to-date concerto from Finland. The Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (complete with spoken introduction by conductor Tim Redmond) proved once more the Phil’s capacity to impress with playing that was not only technically accomplished, but also sensitive, well-paced and powerful.

Mark’s virtuosity and musicianship are staggering. He chose not to play one of the clarinettists’ familiar party pieces but what Tim described as a “fun” concerto. It was composed as recently as 2002, by Magnus Lindberg, who celebrates his 50th birthday this year. Anyone expecting a depressive display of sub-Sibelian gloom and doom was in for a rude awakening; and those (if any) in the large audience who were hoping for an arid sequence in the best traditions of musical sonic geometry must also have scratched their heads in bewilderment. Suffice it to say that the concerto, though not easy to grasp at first hearing, offered the soloist any amount of brilliant display work, multiphonics (apparently the woodwind equivalent of double-stops) and all, but also plenty of room to amuse, shock and move the listeners as well.

Mahler’s first symphony came over with great gusto, a good deal of atmosphere and finesse, a fine sense of style, an enormous dynamic range and the delightful spectacle (required of the players by the composer himself) of seeing the seven-strong horn section rise to their feet to blast the roof off West Road in the final peroration.

On the following Tuesday, the Moscow Philharmonic treated a full house at the Corn Exchange to a rather more sober programme of Russian music. The things that impressed me here were the sheer transparency of the orchestra -- something all too often lacking in performances of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto -- and conductor Jonathan Brett’s sensitive handling of the structure of pieces that are often wrongly censured for not possessing any.

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