Anderson
The Crazed Moon
Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D, Op.61
Tchaikovsky
Symphony No.4 in F minor, Op.36
Christian Tetzlaff (violin)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski
Reviewed by: Richard Whitehouse
Reviewed: 19 March, 2011
Venue: Southbank Centre, London – Royal Festival Hall
Following on from Stations of the Sun, the London Philharmonic audience had a further chance to hear music by the orchestra’s current Composer in Residence. With its twin source of inspiration in the sudden death of a young composer colleague and a lunar eclipse, The Crazed Moon (1997) is among Julian Anderson’s more oblique yet equally personal works. Its commemorative aspect comes through in the sombre processionals that lead up to and away from its central climax – which latter unfolds with a luminosity and eloquence that surely invokes more elemental and also transcendent concerns. Framing all of this are haunting fanfares played by three offstage trumpets that set the tone for what follows as surely as they bestow a last benediction. The piece was sensitively realised by the LPO and attentively directed by Vladimir Jurowski, who deserves credit for reviving a piece that may yet come to be regarded among Anderson’s finest.
The remainder of the programme consisted of standard fare, though ‘standard’ is hardly the right term for describing Christian Tetzlaff’s account of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. With Jurowski setting a brisk but never inflexible tempo for the opening tutti, the first movement was appreciably less measured than is (too) often the case, though with such particulars as the artless second theme and ruminative woodwind dialogue in the development lacking nothing in expressive license. Tetzlaff is not the first to have adapted the startling cadenza that Beethoven wrote for his (surprisingly prosaic) piano transcription of the work, but few have rendered it with such appreciation of its iconoclasm – not least when timpani emerge (Simon Carrington clearly enjoying this unlikely moment in the spotlight) in a virtual ‘jam session’ of call and response, thus opening out the movement’s expressive range still further. The Larghetto might have benefited from even greater inwardness, for all Tetzlaff’s underlying poise, but the soloist’s animated lead-in to the finale set the tone for an athletic canter with ribald humour well to the fore. The first cadenza was slightly too extended, but the second prepared well for the heightened return of the rondo theme then on to an effervescent coda.