EVENING STANDARD
April 29, 2002

THE DASH OF A MAESTRO
By Brian Hunt

Time to celebrate: Kurt Masur, recovered from transplant surgery, was back at last with the London Philharmonic, and marking his 75th birthday. The post-concert dinner and tributes from the great and the good were marginal issues compared with the evening's music-making. After delivering performances of aweinspiring authority and vitality, the German maestro modestly let the orchestra take most of the applause.

Also sharing his limelight were the much-admired German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and veteran French composer Henri Dutilleux, whose Nocturne, Sur le même accord, received its premiere. It is gratefully written for the solo fiddle, with a rich cantabile and broad emotional gestures. The orchestration and harmony are highly coloured and attractive. But it ends just when you think it might get into its stride, and similarly stops short of any real contrapuntal interest, save some putative canonic writing.

It could hardly have been better played; nor could the two Romances for Violin and Orchestra by Beethoven. These can seem meandering pieces, but Mutter gave them compelling momentum. The support from the LPO was marvellous, with section principals leaning forward to respond to every nuance of body language from conductor and soloist.

After the interval came a quite astonishing performance of Debussy's La Mer. It swept along with a dash that threw the syncopations into such relief that rhythms acquired a jazzy lift. This is music that can be interpreted as mistily impressionistic or icily precise, but never before have I heard it so knowingly suave. There was an almost Stokowskian allure to the sound, glowing with details such as a feline growl to the horns, the firm caress of David Theodore's oboe solos, and edge-of-silence pianissimos in which internal balance remained immaculate.

Ravel's La Valse closed the concert with a similar display of wit and panache. If Masur's energy stays at this level, the rest of his tenure as the LPO's principal conductor is going to be thoroughly exhilarating.