Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61
Scriabin
Symphony No. 3 in C-minor, ‘The Divine Poem’
Augustin Hadelich (violin)
Berlin Philharmonic
Kirill Petrenko
Reviewed by: Curtis Rogers
Reviewed: 3 September, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
It’s a fairly unusual concert when a major work by Beethoven is by far the less maverick and more lyrical item, yet that was the case here with the Violin Concerto given alongside Scriabin’s ‘The Divine Poem’. Gentle but sonorous taps from the timpani announced a performance by Kirill Petrenko with the Berlin Philharmonic that was unhurried and had air in the exposition’s unfolding of themes, though the upward scales early on introduced well-judged tension that sustained momentum in the rest of the long opening movement. August Hadelich unfurled a generally lyrical and tender solo violin line, phrased with legato even in the passages of broken chords and cleanly, efficiently despatched torrents of double stopping, particularly in the Kreisler cadenzas. Altogether there was an elegance that looked back to Mozart rather than ahead to the great Romantic concertos, remaining unruffled even in the face of the orchestra’s more emphatic episodes.
The Larghetto – bordering on something slightly slower – was a rapt, private meditation or love song, the violin singing an exquisite cantilena over the orchestra’s subtle murmuring after its initial passionate climax on the first few iterations of the principal theme subsided. Orchestra and soloist roused itself to a somewhat earthier account of the rondo finale, but Hadelich’s interpretation remained essentially genial in articulating the solo part. As an encore, doused in seedy purplish-blue light over the stage, he gave an aptly soothing rendition of a solo arrangement of Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’ from the Kinderszenen, beginning with rising octaves exactly like the violin’s first entry in Beethoven’s Concerto, before being borne on a bluesy sequence of chords and dissolving into nothing by way of a series of harmonics high on the E string.
Scriabin’s Symphony No. 3 is really an overlong tone poem in three continuous sections which chart the soul’s spiritual progress from enslavement to God to self-liberation and recognition of the divine in itself, via the experience of pleasure and beauty. The concert’s programme included an amusing note quoting critical responses to the work at its previous Proms outing (by the Sydney Symphony under Vladimir Ashkenazy in 2010) commenting on its self-indulgent metaphysics and musical stasis. It’s perhaps not so much static – there’s plenty of jaunty, syncopated movement – as that its merry-go-round of contrasting themes never really develop. It ends more or less where it began, fixated upon a glowingly orchestrated chord that is a version of the Tristan chord which never exactly opens up into the varied harmonic realms it might portend.
Petrenko and the BP certainly did as much as they could to bring vitality and a sense of narrative – after its pregnant opening motif (a statement of self-assertion by Scriabin, though it also sounds like a more angular version of that which underpins one of Liszt’s pioneering tome poems, Les préludes) the themes of the ensuing Allegro were well pointed and detailed. Although swirling with energy, texturally the music remained lucid even if, paradoxically, the strings were at their most luscious in this opening section depicting ‘Battles’ and in the concluding ‘Divine Game’ rather than in the middle section’s ‘Voluptuousness’. Like a situation of being the only sober person in the company of drunkards, it’s difficult to gain access to the subjective experience of another’s mystical trance which doesn’t have any external reference point by which it can be measured. So it was that it’s probably impossible to find an interpretative way into the work other than to keep up a cheery, bustling momentum through the Symphony’s fevered passages, which the orchestra achieved with style. It was enough to stir up the usual cretinous, musically illiterate sections of the audience who can’t detect when conductor and orchestra have brought a work to a complete conclusion but, instead, started to applaud before the last two chords. Evidently the music’s mystical spell was insufficiently entrancing.