Founded in 2006, the Symphony Orchestra of India is the country’s first and only professional orchestra. Its first visit to Britain four years ago showed that it was a solid band, with few weaknesses but plenty of character in all departments, an impression confirmed by the first concert of its latest tour. To judge from the orchestra list the players are still a pretty cosmopolitan lineup, with a high number coming from Kazakhstan, but one of the orchestra’s most important roles back at its base in Mumbai is to train home-grown musicians, who might then go on to join its ranks.
Three different programmes, each with a different conductor and different soloist, make up the eight dates on its current itinerary. Richard Farnes was the conductor for the opening, whose programme was not at all the hackneyed selection of popular works that touring orchestras so often seem to think is the only way to make an impression with British audiences. The opening item, the Imperial March from John Williams’ Star Wars score, delivered with plenty of swagger and brassy aggression, was the only concession to populism, and was followed by Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with Pavel Kolesnikov as the soloist. It was a thoroughly competent performance, well supported by the orchestra, with fine solo contributions from the principal horn and principal cello in the opening movement and Andante respectively, but not a particularly revealing one. Kolesnikov never seemed entirely relaxed, and a couple of memory lapses in the finale suggested he was perhaps still coming to terms with the concerto’s demanding scale.
The final work in the programme, the suite that conductor Andrew Gourlay has abstracted from Wagner’s Parsifal, gave the orchestra its best chance to show what it is really capable of. Gourlay reorders the seven orchestral passages, but Farnes presented them as an almost seamless musical span, with only the occasional jarring transition, and just the spaciousness the music needs, with the rich, surging tone of the orchestra’s strings providing a secure foundation.
• At Cadogan Hall, London, 30 November, and touring to 8 December
