A couple of months ago, John Eliot Gardiner and the LSO delivered an electrifying programme featuring Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony. Last night’s leg of their Mendelssohn journey took us south from the gloom of the Scottish glens to the blazing Mediterranean sunshine of the Italian Symphony.
Gardiner’s Mendelssohn with the LSO packs a surprisingly hefty punch. But paradoxically the genial Italian Symphony benefited less from their visceral attack — string players once again standing to deliver — than did the harder-edged Scottish. It’s good nevertheless to have preconceptions about this composer challenged. His music is not as pallid and shallow as it’s often made out to be, and this reading of the Italian exploited the exhilarating athleticism of the first movement and the frenzied Neapolitan dance rhythms of the saltarello finale.
Gardiner’s bracing approach worked well in Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas overture, where the mettlesome rhythms and minor tonality were seized on to bring Victor Hugo’s macabre world thrillingly to life.
If Schumann’s Violin Concerto was less of a high-voltage affair, that is only appropriate for this fascinating work of the composer’s last years, written shortly before his final decline into insanity. The concerto has taken a long time to establish itself — it languished unperformed for 80 years after its 1853 premiere under Schumann himself — though some of its structural and harmonic idiosyncrasies now seem less the product of a madman than revealing glimpses into the composer’s tortured mind. Alina Ibragimova brought her characteristically eloquent tone and phrasing to bear in a performance that rightly disturbed as much as it delighted.
