Philharmonia/Salonen; Britten Sinfonia, Mark Padmore; James Rhodes – review

Hardly an average week for the Philharmonia . First the orchestra celebrated its 65th birthday with a concert at Windsor Castle in the presence of its patron of three decades, the Prince of Wales. Another night, another gala, maybe, though by all accounts, with Bryn Terfel heading the line-up, it was a memorable event. The more exceptional achievement, a reminder of the capabilities of this marvellous ensemble, came at the Festival Hall on Thursday. They performed Stravinsky's Rite of Spring . This may sound perverse. Stravinsky started work on his score for the Ballets Russes 100 years ago, in May 1911. Its Paris premiere two years later may have caused cultural mayhem, but now every orchestra expects to play it regularly, if only to up the "20th-century" quota. Last year the Philharmonia won two RPS Music awards for Re-Rite , an imaginative audio-visual project with The Rite of Spring at its core. They might reasonably want a rest from it. All of which makes their performance under the baton of principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen all the more bewildering, not to say shocking. One of my "wish I'd been there" moments has long been that day, in June 1912, when Stravinksy persuaded Debussy to play through a four-hand version of the incomplete work. Debussy, the better pianist, took the bass and Stravinksy, peering through his glasses at his own notes, hummed missing bits. "We were dumbfounded, flattened as though by a hurricane from the roots of time," an observer, the musicologist Louis Laloy, wrote. It's hard to improve on his words. Thursday's Rite was phenomenal. Thanks as much to Disney as to Diaghilev, we tend to regard this work as a raw enactment of Earth's seasonal renewal. Yet the further we move from its time of composition, the more it appears to embody humanity's wholesale self-destruction. The machine age and premonitions of war are encapsulated in its terrifying, elemental menace, via screeching, hooting, convulsive woodwind and the ferocious roar of trombones and tuba. The extreme violence of the climactic passages makes the moments of quieter tension all the more telling. The Philharmonia's playing was terrific, in detail and in grand design. The Rite may have begun as a dance but surely now it has grown undanceable: you would have to leap through the roof and crash through the ground to compete. That said, Salonen offered his own solo ritual dance, his compact body splaying and twisting heroically. The audience roared. This column was meant, until Stravinksy got in the way, to be about the Philharmonia's Bartók series, Infernal Dance, of which this concert was part. It opened with the Cantata Profana (1930), well sung by the Coro Gulbenkian, followed by the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). The concert is on Radio 3 on Thursday. The series continues in June. Meanwhile, Symphony Hall, Birmingham is handing out 2,000 pairs of 3D glasses on 21 April for Klaus Obermaier's Rite of Spring in 3D with the CBSO and, according to the blurb, much video parallaxing. It sounds intriguing though for the moment I am quite parallaxed enough. Stravinsky, bully that he is, has also pushed out space deserved for a full review of the Britten Sinfonia strings, who toured a meticulously thoughtful if somewhat episodic English programme, ending tonight in Norwich. Dies Natalis , by the iconoclast Gerald Finzi, makes rapturous use of devotional texts by Thomas Traherne. The tenor Mark Padmore brought his own hushed intensity to this, as well as to Purcell settings via the prism of Tippett and John Woolrich. This ensemble is blessed with an exceptional leader, Jacqueline Shave. In a programme interview, asked to imagine herself as an animal, she opts for the sea eagle – a perfect choice reflecting her strength as well as her power to inspire musical flight. To paraphrase Lionel Shriver, though with no ominous intent, we need to talk about James. Specifically, James Rhodes . Everyone else has. In glossy magazines, rock pages of newspapers and online, his face, hollow-cheeked behind big glasses, stares out. The late starter pursued another career and a troubled life before returning to the piano in his early 30s. He has had TV success and hit No 1 on iTunes. Tours to Asia and Australia, and a slot on CBS's hallowed 60 Minutes are in the pipeline. All this, yet in the concert hall he is unknown. So far, the "serious" music press has adopted a wait-and-see attitude, though he will feature in the April issue of BBC Music Magazine . Rhodes's transformation has been swift. He is still studying technique and learning repertoire. Perhaps out of wild-boy recklessness, he finds the most fiendish pieces by Liszt or Bach or Ravel addictive, yet the main canon is not yet hard-wired into his fingers as might be the case for a player who started as a toddler and never deviated from the path of virtuosity. Rhodes only learned for a few years in his teens then stopped. His joy at a second chance in life, through music, is palpable. He has become an atypical evangelist, shunning concert gear for skinny jeans and playing alternative venues. He performs with a manic energy which can be glistening and poetic yet paradoxically may be splashed with wrong notes. He would not win an elite piano competition. Other more brilliant players can do that. To judge Rhodes in those terms would be crazily to miss the point. If he is wise he will work within his capacity, practising the while like mad, reaching an untapped source of listeners. Good for him. This week, as he said, "I can say I've sold out the Albert Hall". He was playing, cabaret-style, in the hall's Elgar Room, transformed into a bar with tables for 160 people and an orange Yamaha piano once used by Elton John. People of all ages and types sat with bottled beer and crisps. Yet when Rhodes played ("some fucking Bach", as he put it), he commanded total silence. His next appearance is in London's West End at the Ambassadors theatre (2 and 16 March), probably a first of its kind since David Helfgott, subject of the film Shine , played the Old Vic in 2000. "We're not planning to sell ice cream to Eskimos," Rhodes's manager said this week. "Eskimos" might be benign to his idiosyncratic sales pitch, his infectious musical eloquence and rare showmanship, but the classical world has teeth and jaws. Best stay this side of the sharks' aquarium.