Simon Rattle and his Munich-based orchestra began their European tour in Liverpool and Birmingham this week with music by Schumann and Stravinsky. For London, though, they brought a different programme, in the shape of Janáček, a lifetime Rattle speciality, and Bruckner, a composer from whom the conductor once seemed to keep his distance but whose music he has gradually embraced with greater confidence.
The quality of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra was obvious in Janáček’s Taras Bulba rhapsody. At the start, ardent cor anglais, oboe and violin solos float above rich and shimmering strings before a sudden and more violent call to Slavic heroics: Janáček at his most angular and spine-tingling. The Bavarians’ playing of this quicksilver and fervent score was predictably first-class. Maybe, though, the orchestral mastery was also a notch too technically perfect, missing the ineffable fragility that animates so much of Janáček’s music so brilliantly. No reservations, though, about the excitement of the final movement, in which Janáček’s score catches fire.
