Philharmonia/Salonen – review

Let's hear it for a concert series inspired not by the dutiful observance of a composer's anniversary, but by what a conductor actually wants to conduct. And yet nobody at this second instalment of the Philharmonia's year-long Bartók exploration would have been able to say Esa-Pekka Salonen was wearing his passion on his sleeve. In fact, the work that most benefited from his cool, collected approach was the only one not by Bartók. That was Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which closed the programme in a welter of ear-splitting brass and reverberating timpani; the performance held the music's visceral and balletic sides in tense, thrilling balance. Salonen's beat was almost metronomic – and, in the opening section, seemingly as relaxed as if he were conducting a Sousa march. But it was light-footed, too, and created an unstoppable momentum. Salonen's approach to Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta had been similarly dispassionate. The celesta sounded magically eerie, as ever, but string sound doesn't glow in the Festival Hall, the violins lost their nerve on one or two entries, and the resulting performance seemed more than ideally chilly. Bartók loved Stravinsky's music, specifically The Rite, for the way it harnessed folk music; Stravinsky professed to hate Bartók's music for exactly the same reason. He probably didn't rate the Cantata Profana, a 1930 rarity that opened the programme, very highly. Did Bartók intend his setting of a Romanian folk tale about men transforming into stags as a spiritual fable or as a purely musical tone poem? It is pitched somewhere between the two, evocative yet slightly insubstantial. Father and son were sung by baritone Michele Kalmandi and Attila Fekete, whose tensile tenor went up and up. • Broadcast on Radio 3 on 17 February