Nowadays orchestras rely much less than they once did on the tried and trusted concert formula of overture-concerto-symphony. But the Philharmonia’s programme with conductor Elim Chan more or less reverted to that archetype. More or less, because the “symphony” in this case was a symphonic suite, Rimsky-Korsakov’s gorgeously coloured Scheherazade, and the piano concerto was not one of the regular romantic showpieces but a new work by Bryce Dessner, co-commissioned by the orchestra, and receiving its British premiere.
Dessner composed his 20-minute work last year for Alice Sara Ott, who was the soloist here. It is dedicated to his sister, the dancer and choreographer Jessica Reese Dessner, who currently has cancer and whom Dessner describes as his “greatest inspiration since I was very young”. The concerto is a mixture of the exuberantly extrovert and the gently personal. All three of its movements – How to Dance, How to Breathe, How to Feel – have oases of delicate intimacy, but it’s the sheer brilliance and ebullience of the music, with insistent rhythms that seem to owe as much to rock as they do to Steve Reich, that come across most powerfully. Ott was a superb soloist, dazzling in the music’s more extreme virtuoso writing, exquisitely delicate in its moments of tender quietness.
