“On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly…”
 
The lead-up to Christmas at the Barbican threatens to induce satiation long before the big day itself, thought thankfully totally calorie free! To be able to hear Chailly, Alsop, Handel’s Alcina (from Minkowski), Scholl, Jaroussky, Bartoli, Pappano, Trpceski and Gardiner within as many days is luxury indeed. I went to the Gewandhausorchester and Chailly and was rewarded with one of the finest concerts for many years. Here’s an orchestra on truly magnificent form: silky strings, beautifully characterful woodwinds who play in chorale with an ideal unanimity, a brass section of colossal power but also great subtlety, and overall, an ensemble capable of whip-crack power when required. And a programme of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto (with Arcadi Volodos the soloist), Francesca da Rimini and Respighi’s The Pines of Rome was superbly judged and stunningly performed.
 
The Tchaikovsky concerto was done in the original version though it was quite hard to tell apart from the usual edition – there were apparently about 20 extra bars in the finale and a few phrases assigned to “different” instruments. Rather more important was the range of pianism Volodos summoned up - from the most subtlely poetic to the pile-driving (the opening chords remain the same as the standard version though the very first performance had the piano playing arpeggios). Volodos is an artist in command of a colossal colour palette as his magnificent (and Gramophone Award-winning) Sony Classical album “Volodos in Vienna” proved, and he aimed at the Tchaikovsky his full armoury. And Chailly’s sympathy with his soloist was extraordinary – every contour from piano to fortissimo was followed exactly, the orchestral sound swelling and diminishing as if tethered to the piano lines. And Volodos showed the qualities of a seasoned chamber-music player when the piano slipped into an accompanying role for some of the terrific wind-players of the Gewandhausorchester.
 
The Francesca da Rimini was positively incendiary – this was a vision of Hell of scorching intensity, and at the heart of the storm offered a portrait of these two doomed lovers sketched with a delicacy that tore at the heart.
 
To close the programme, we were treated to a performance of the Respighi that I simply can’t imagine better done: this was a beautifully conceived, evidently lovingly rehearsed reading that drew on every department of this great orchestra – and everyone played as if their life depended on it, and clearly enjoyed every moment. This is the sort of piece that can play itself, but without subtlety, yet when prepared with this kind of detail it ascends many notches up the scale and sounds like great music. Why do so few conductors of the top flight ignore this repertoire? Karajan, Reiner, Toscanini et al, played this music with as much care as a Beethoven symphony. Today, only Chailly and Muti treat this music with the kind of respect and love it deserves.
 
Four days later, Marin Alsop joined the LSO for a programme of Mahlerised Beethoven with a luscious centrepiece of seven songs by Alma Mahler orchestrated by Colin and David Matthews. Though Mahler’s editions of the Beethoven symphonies deserve to be heard from time to time – especially when played with the kind of oomph that Alsop and the LSO brought to them (the finale of Symphony No 7 was wild!) – it was Alma’s songs that stole my heart. Sarah Connolly sang them magnificently and the Matthews brothers’ orchestrations looked towards Zemlinsky rather than Alma’s husband for their language (in many ways Alma was more progressive than her husband). Harmonically they caught that “crest of the wave moment” where tonality starts to melt into the foam of atonality – Marin Alsop proved as fine an accompanist here – breathing with her singer, easing into phrases – as Chailly had at that earlier concert.
 
Mahler’s editions of Beethoven sanction a breadth that current performance practice rather shuns – and they do remain rather disconcerting experiences when the “wrong” instrument suddenly starts playing a particular phrase. That said, I really would love to hear Mahler’s Eroica which Marin Alsop has done with her Baltimore orchestra.