Prom 67: Tarmo Peltokoski conducts BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Patricia Kopatchinskaja playing Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’ (arr. Ralph Greaves)

Arnold Schoenberg
Violin Concerto, Op.36

Dmitry Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op.47

Patricia Kopatchinskaja
violin

BBC Symphony Orchestra
Tarmo Peltokoski
conductor

Are Finnish conductors getting younger? At just 24 Tarmo Peltokoski has already built an impressive CV since graduating from Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy. Coaching from Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Esa-Pekka Salonen, to name just a few of his teachers, has given Peltokoski a solid technique, much in evidence here in three radically different works from the 1930s. His ability to communicate is no less impressive, evident in the opening strains of Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’, its arrangement by Ralph Greaves based on music from the composer’s opera Sir John in Love, in this well-balanced and polished account, flute and harp nicely pointed with strings glowing and confiding, the whole played with warmth and affection.

A stylistic volte face followed with Schoenberg’s uncompromisingly twelve-tone Violin Concerto (1936), its angularities and fearsome challenges dispatched with
characterful expression by Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Her commitment to the work was abundantly clear in a revealing account that outlined its quick-change sequence of shifting panoramas, Schoenberg’s restless imagination caught to perfection. That she had the measure of the work was apparent in flawless intonation and her ability to bring cohesion to the work’s labyrinthine complexities and volatile moods, her playing assertive, then sweetly lyrical and tender, all within the blink of an eye, the first-movement a cadenza a garland of passionate declarations and whispered asides. The central Andante grazioso brought intimacy and a lightness of touch, but it was in the Finale where she sashayed seamlessly through its martial and puckish landscape, relishing angst and playfulness. She almost transformed the second cadenza into a cabaret act with
stomping feet, dancing gestures and a cheeky grin. In all, a performance of stunning virtuosity, the orchestra sensitive collaborators and Peltokoski assured and fastidious. Two comic encores followed, including a ragtime parody by Giya Kancheli, both renditions wonderfully communicative.

After the interval Peltokoski fashioned a distinctive account of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, its emotional journey marked periodically by barely audible strings,gripping in its intensity, and heightening surrounding sullenness and malevolence. The Allegretto brought nose-thumbing and a superbly crafted Trio, while the Largo’s elegy could barely have sounded more desolate, flute, harp and strings in hushed communion with one another. Notwithstanding a rhythmic disagreement within the cellos near the end this was a hauntingly beautiful lament. The Finale erupted from silence, Peltokoski galvanising a propulsive, feverish traversal, allowing brass and percussion to raise the temperature (timpani resolutely defiant) and the obstinate string-writing evoking a battering-ram concluded a memorable performance.