LEIPZIG GEWANDHAUS ORCHESTRA REVIEW

06/09/2009
Reviewed by Pat O’Kelly

The National Concert Hall opens its new season with a visit by one of Europe’s oldest orchestras – the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Tracing its ancestry back to 1743, the ensemble’s worldwide reputation is certainly justified.

Under its Italian music director Riccardo Chailly, the programme not only honours the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth but also his tenure as the orchestra’s principal conductor in the 1830s.

In his ‘Hebrides’ Overture - a stunning seascape reflecting his visit to the Scottish Isles in 1829 - the Gewandhaus strings are at their most seductive expressively floating Mendelssohn’s melodic inventiveness.

Maestro Chailly maybe allows the woodwind over-pointed emphasis but then underlying eddies and turbulent swells in the music create unsettling fascination.

Stricter musical form arrives with Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. Palestinian artist Saleem Abboud Ashkar reveals the delicacy of the composer’s elegant phrasing and makes the central ‘song without words’ Andante particularly lyrical.

The somewhat empty flourishes of the outer movements find the soloist no less attuned to their bravura-fingered fireworks.

The second half of the evening is awash with exotic Russian character. Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on a bare mountain’ has the biting precision of Rimsky-Korsakov’s vivid arrangement while his piano ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ spring to life in Ravel’s masterly orchestration.

The Gewandhaus players capture every fleeting nuance and every lingering dramatic gesture. Each of the sketches tells its own story be it a lumbering Polish oxcart, the twittering women of Limoges or the cavernous depths of Roman Catacombs.

But, under Chailly’s direction, this is a performance of enormous stature and massive proportion culminating in Kiev’s ‘Great Gate’. Kremlin bells toll majestically and the NCH resounds with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s magisterial refulgence.