London

INBAL SEGEV (CELLO) LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/OKSANA LYNIV

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 9 FEBRUARY 2024 

Martinů and Richard Strauss made music of lasting value in the aftermath of war, with the Memorial to Lidice and Metamorphosen. More frequently, composers have struggled to process their feelings as a direct response to conflict (compare the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies of Shostakovich). The Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Polevá was moved to write her Fourth Symphony by the Russian invasion of her homeland, having fled Kyiv for Poland and then Switzerland. In exile, she has produced a 20-minute unbroken elegy for cello and large orchestra, subtitled ‘The Bell’.

Inbal Segev was the committed soloist at this UK premiere just as she had been for the first performance last autumn in Dallas. While Segev struggled at times to make herself heard over a slowly shifting, cloudy mass of stepwise tonal chords and heavy tolling chimes, her tone retained an impressive core through long stretches of high-lying but directionless recitative. Beyond the immediate context of tragedy, the symphony stands in a line of orchestral threnodies by Polevá such as Ono (2004) and Null (2006), both comparably portentous.

CHRIS LEE

Electrifying Shostakovich from Pablo Ferrández and the LPO

Her compatriot Oksana Lyniv lifted the spirits after the interval with a superbly pointed account of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, eliciting first-class playing from the LPO.

PETER QUANTRILL

COURTESY LPO

SILESIAN QUARTET, MATS LIDSTRÖM (CELLO)

WIGMORE HALL 19 FEBRUARY 2024

Founded more than 35 years ago, the Silesian Quartet continued its promotion of music from its Polish homeland in this Wigmore Hall recital.

Mieczysław Weinberg was born in newly independent Poland in 1919. The bleak opening movement of his 1957 String Quartet (the seventh of 17) – with a long-arching but spare melody – was movingly played by first violinist Szymon Krzeszowiec, combining vulnerability (using sparing vibrato) with a fetching sweetness of tone. In the ‘dance of death’ second movement, the supporting pizzicato rhythm was precise but with a beguiling soft edge; and in the middle section of the finale the Silesian drew great tension from textural complexity and harmonic dissonance.

Lutosławski’s 1964 String Quartet opened (again by Krzeszowiec) with tightly shaped short gestures and dynamic markings scrupulously observed. There was concentrated focus throughout, not least in the quick-cut contrasts of material and texture.

Witold Maliszewski moved from Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) to Poland in 1921. For his 1904 String Quintet the Silesian was joined by cellist Mats Lidström. The idiom is much more conservative, but the five players allowed its Romantic vein to bloom and offered a spirited scherzo. Lidström fitted in seamlessly, matching his fellow players’ individual flair, as well as blending in with them.

EDWARD BHESANIA

PABLO FERRÁNDEZ (CELLO) LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA/ KARINA CANELLAKIS

ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL 21 FEBRUARY 2024

On the day the London Philharmonic Orchestra announced that Karina Canellakis’s contract as principal guest conductor had been renewed for a further three years, they appeared together in a concert contrasting a Russian first half with Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in the second. The opening Prelude (‘Dawn on the Moscow River’) from Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina unfolded with a keen narrative quality, beautifully balancing richness and definition.

Pablo Ferrández was the fourth prize winner at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition and proved an assured interpreter of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no.1 in E flat major. There was plenty of bounce to the bow in the opening of the first movement and Ferrández attacked his second entry with great emotional power. The LPO strings oozed warmth in the dark opening of the Moderato, after which Ferrández managed to combine lyrical radiance with deep uncertainty. His theme in harmonics, icy and precise, with celesta responses, was eerie in the extreme. The following cadenza movement was compelling and the dramatic high point, after which orchestra and soloist vividly projected the grotesquerie of the finale.

Brahms’s Fourth brought an ideal, modern – or at least newer-style – approach. Given there was no skimping on lyricism, the lines and textures were remarkably transparent and the forms pliable. On this showing, the continuing LPO/Canellakis partnership should reap attention-grabbing musical rewards.

EDWARD BHESANIA