THE TIMES OF LONDON
NOVEMBER 21, 1998

GERMAN GIANT DANCES IN WITH A LIGHT STEP
By Richard Morrison

The 1990s will not go down as a golden era of stability in the history of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Indeed it seemed at times as if the only thing standing between the players and the breadline was their own I unyielding pride.

But prospects are much rosier now. Last week the orchestra announced, to some astonishment, that it had wooed Kurt Masur - fearsome maestro of the New York Philharmonic - to be its principal conductor. And on Thursday at the Festival Hall the 71-year-old German was welcomed with playing in the LPO's best traditions: ardent, alert and stylish.

Masur is a commanding hulk - 6ft 3ins tall, and broad with it - who belies his terrifying visage by bouncing around the podium like a schoolboy on the terraces. His music-making has much the same duality. You expect, and get, a seasoned authority, especially in the central Austro-Gennan repertoire. What comes as a pleasant shock is Masur's frequently deployed light touch; an exquisitely delicate phrasing here, a witty flourish there.

That was especially apparent in Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. Masur took an impish delight in playing up the sudden contrasts, the bubbling unpredictability and the stop-start humour of this most boisterous of masterpieces. In his hands the symphony became a funfair for fleet-footed giants.

The LPO responded with panache, if not always with absolute precision. Masur's famously rigorous rehearsal technique will surely sharpen that up in the coming years.

The concert's second half was initially disconcerting. For a new principal conductor to stand motionless on the platform while an actor narrates a breathless adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt seemed oddly self-effacing. But Masur has made Grieg's incidental music something of a party-piece in recent years, and he does it beautifully.

Like Ibsen's play, the music mixes the genuinely tender and the spikily sardonic. Masur judged the balance perfectly, much helped in Solveig's Song by the silvery purity of Edith Wiens's Soprano, and in the mock-grotesque Hall of the Mountain King by the lusty contribution of the London Philharmonic Choir.

But the star of the show, inevitably, was Simon Callow as Peer, sprawled decadently in an armchair, or leaping up like a mad dog, snarling defiance at the tormenting trolls; In truth, his depiction of the Nordic anti-hero was not so different from his rambunctious old queen in Four Weddings and a Funeral. But he did utterly command the massive Festival Hall, both vocally and psychologically. Few others in today's small-voiced, telly-focused acting profession could do that.