Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Riccardo Frizza
Piano: Jeneba Kanneh-Mason
Cadogan Hall
09 December 2024
Part of Cadogan Hall’s Zurich International Orchestral Series 2024-25, this concert featured three warmly popular but contrasting works and made each of them sound arrestingly fresh.
There is something distinctively Hungarian about the sound quality of the orchestra and it rang out clearly in the opening piece: Liszt’s programmatic Mephsito Waltz No I. The muscularity of the playing in the frisky scene-setting section contrasted well with the soulful cello melody, the violin and cello solos and the harp glissandi. Riccardo Frizzi had it well balanced (with, unusually, violas sitting opposite first violins) notwithstanding the lack of orchestral raking at Cadogan Hall which means that there is occasional orchestral fuzziness from stalls seats.
The heart of this concert was a stunning performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto by Jeneba Kanneh-Mason. Probably the best loved and best known of all piano concertos, it takes a pretty special pianist to diffuse the cliché element. Kanneh-Mason, still only 21, played it with astonishing assurance and poise and I heard left hand work in this performance which I have never before noticed. Her account of the adagio was achingly beautiful without ever being saccharine and it blended perfectly with the wind solos, especially flute and bassoon. The incisive string work in the finale and Kanneh-Mason’s apparently effortless fluidity of interpretation brought the concerto to a resounding and powerful end. No wonder the audience applauded so enthusiastically.
The second half of the concert took us back a century to Beethoven’s ground breaking third symphony, Eroica. Frizza gave us a first movement full of tension and excitement and let us feel all the contrasts and moods with some fine horn work. He laid his baton down and conducted the Funeral March with his hands. There were some exquisite pianissimo passages and wonderfully clear triplets under the wind solos. The contrasting third movement was admirably crisp. One can always judge the finale by the quality of the pizzicato at the beginning and this performance delivered it with incisive elegance. It was good, moreover, to hear the violas so clearly especially in the fugal passage as we worked towards the ending which was, as it must be to work, a subtle blend of gentleness and grandiloquence.
And then, after raputurous applause, Frizza slipped back on stage with a few extra players to play a perfect encore: the most wittily exaggerated account of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No 5 that I’ve ever heard – with long notes snatched off and the intervening passages at breakneck speed. It was a delicious lollipop at the end of an exceptionally interesting, enjoyable concert.
