Czech Symphony National Orchestra
Established twenty five years ago, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra has toured all over the world, working with the likes of Ennio Morricone , Anna Netrebko and Quentin Tarantino, on a diverse range of performance and film scores. No strangers to offering up evenings of accessible, celebrated work, their programme at the Theatre Royal was diverse, yet familiar, with a virtuoso performance of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto sandwiched in between well-loved pieces from Schubert and Dvořák.
Schubert’s Symphony No 8 is famously unfinished, with the shift from unfolding melody to musical turbulence never truly resolved, and guest conductor Ben Palmer seemed to struggle with this transition, offering up a hesitant, lukewarm start to the evening. Matters weren’t helped by the cramped arrangements on stage, which required the seventy performers of the Orchestra to sit in rows, on the flat, several bodies deep. It would be an exaggeration to say that the brass and timpani, so important to the second movement, couldn’t be heard, but range and dynamics were certainly diminished. The underwhelming result was therefore perhaps more to do with performance conditions than the performers, but from the perspective of the auditorium is was hard to distinguish the two.
Beethoven’s Concerto No 4 is all about the virtuosity of the pianist and Pavel Kolesnikov was more than up for the task. From the opening bars of the Emperor Concerto, Beethoven flouts convention with a piano solo, and while the orchestra quickly interjects, it does so only sporadically. All of which allowed the preposterously youthful and talented Kolesnikov to, frankly, show off – which he did with an ease and dexterity that frequently defied rational explanation. Fingers are, surely, not designed to work like that. Investing Beethoven’s music with a fluidity more usually associated with jazz, he brought a signature style to the work that was never less than impressive and was frequently astonishing. There were times, particular beyond the second movement, when this technical brilliance impeded the romantic voice of the music (even the likes of Alfred Brendal or Glenn Gloud used to rein in it by the final movement) so that the performance lacked unity, but there can surely be no doubt that this gifted young performer will go on to great things.
Saving the best until last, certainly in terms of performance, Dvořák’s New World Symphony proved to be the most successful piece of the night. It’s easy to imagine that in the interval Palmer had given the orchestra a good talking to – there was certainly a renewed rigour and enthusiasm to their playing - with even the occasional smile breaking out in the sea of diffident faces on stage. Unhooking the second movement’s melody from a certain bread advert is never going to be easy for a certain generation, but this work is so much richer, with influences ranging from African American spirituals to European folk music roots. Sometimes the greatest pleasure of a populist concert is being reminded how brilliant very familiar pieces of music are - with Palmer more animated than we had seen him all evening, and the orchestra finally producing the unified sound we had been waiting for all night, it felt like a lesson not only taught, but one they had learned for themselves. As if in confirmation, the evening closed on a tango from Astor Piazzolla, an unscheduled bonus of an encore which was, ironically, the strongest performance of the evening. Finally, it felt like the orchestra were saying, we can have some proper fun. Suffused with an exuberance showing what they could do when let off the leash, it left the audience wanting more.
Curtain calls, applause and much bowing followed, with Ben Palmer sweetly directing players from the back of the stage to stand individually, as if to acknowledge their previously hidden status. Up they popped, like meerkats, revealing for the first time the extraordinary number of those which we had imperfectly heard, and not previously seen. It was a tacit acknowledgement of something that has been discussed, argued and moaned about for years – that Norwich lacks a proper classical music venue - and while evenings such as these are greedily consumed by patrons eager to enjoy the music they love, my abiding feeling was one of frustration that there is nowhere in the city truly fit for that purpose.
