Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse in Paris – Alexandre Kantorow plays Beethoven, and Tarmo Peltokoski conducts Mahler

Beethoven
Piano Concerto No.4 in G, Op.58

Mahler
Symphony No.6 in A minor

Alexandre Kantorow (piano)

Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse
Tarmo Peltokoski

Asked to name any conductor outside the UK and the chances are you’ll head straight to Finland for an answer. Twenty-six-year-old Tarmo Peltokoski has been at the helm of the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse since 2024, and next season becomes the Music Director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. This concert began with a collaboration with the equally gifted French pianist Alexandre Kantorow who secured a Gold Medal at the 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019.

After a matter-of-fact opening gambit, the Beethoven unfolded as a characterful traversal, Peltokoski allowing woodwind and horns to point up incidental detail. Possessing a flawless technique, Kantorow brought honesty of expression and occasional reverie, adding intrusive decoration here and there that felt needlessly flamboyant, none more so than in the cadenza. Aggressive gestures from Peltokoski launched the Andante, Kantorow rightly ignoring them with his own poised rumination to create a profound peace with his closing peroration – time suspended. There followed an incisive Rondo, strings neat as a pin and Kantorow enjoying himself in immaculate passagework, triplet figures dancing off the page. And if not entirely pulse-raising, the cadenza found a home for both belligerence and playfulness, compelling enough for the audience to call him back for two encores: the first of Brahms’s Op. 117 Intermezzos and Scriabin’s Vers la flamme, Op.72.

And Scriabin’s unpredictable world of intense drama later found release in a blistering Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, the Toulouse orchestra bringing out all the work’s emotional turmoil and playing as if their lives depended on it. Never have I heard those opening bars played with such savagery, the bows of the lower strings so forceful there could have been a fire hazard. Thankfully, Peltokoski opted for restraint in the exposition repeat, thereafter sustaining momentum with ceaseless intensity, no less so for that gift-wrapped Alma theme, as radiant and soaring as one could wish for. The Scherzo’s rhythmic bite was no less demonstrative, nor sonorities any less individual with ‘bells up’ clarinets and a coquettish oboe a distinct presence, the whole macabre and verging on the hysterical. Much needed balm arrived in the Andante with finely sculpted woodwind and horn contributions, the Toulouse strings fabulously pearlescent and the movement’s archlike trajectory beautifully judged, Peltokoski’s tempos spot on. The 30-minute Finale was uncompromisingly hard driven, doom-laden yet relieved by moments of intense rapture, its questing spirit at the forefront of Peltokoski’s conception, the final (second) hammer-blow as brutal as the work had begun. All in all, a shattering performance and leaving one in no doubt as to the strength of this conductor’s relationship with his Toulouse players.