Back to List
The talent required for so comprehensive a victory was front and centre throughout his performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Technically assured, brimming with confidence and bravura, he also produced a singing tone that ranged from sweetness to emphatic assertion according to what the music needed.
There was also an unmistakeable sense of end-orientation: in the first movement towards the virtuosic cadenza, and in the slow second towards the fast third. As a result, whatever it is that's meant by talk of depth in Brahms was some way down the list of priorities from execution. He was able to focus more completely on this aspect of his playing in an encore, the famous 24th Caprice by Paganini, one of the most showily challenging pieces ever written for solo violin. He dispatched it with joyous ease, especially the variation with pizzicato, and appeared even more fully in his element here than in the Brahms.
He was graciously partnered in the concerto by Peruvian conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who opened the concert with Sikuris, a short, cinematic but not really memorable colour piece by Carlos Zamora, who was born in Chile in 1968 (think Maurice Jarre meets El salon Mexico).
Harth-Bedoya came entirely into his own in Dvorak's great Eighth Symphony, scaling its peaks and valleys, unleashing all its excitement, nostalgia, and earthiness, and stewarding all the sharp contrasts of colour that feature in the composer's mature approach to orchestration. Although unlikely to ever achieve the popular status of its successor, the New World Symphony, Dvorak Eight has all the ingredients (except a nickname) to rival it nonetheless, especially in a fully animated and full-bodied performance like this one.