London Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Manze, Festival Hall - classical music review

Andrew Manze turned in a muscular performance at festival hall, says Barry Millington
In full swing: Andrew Manze (Picture: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images)
Barry Millington15 March 2015

John Ireland was born in 1879, a couple of decades after Elgar, but by the time he died in 1962, his fellow Lancastrians the Beatles were entering the charts.

Ireland is an unjustly neglected composer and an exemplar of what has come to be known as “Romantic Modernism”: the thesis being that English composers of the Thirties were discreet modernists with deep roots in the 19th century.

The slow movement of Ireland’s Piano Concerto is unashamedly Romantic and Piers Lane, who has long been a persuasive advocate of the work, realised its lyrical introspection irreproachably. He and conductor Andrew Manze were also alert to the more modernist outer movements, which remind one of Ravel’s sparky and contemporary G-major Concerto, although patriots will be glad to note that our man’s work was premiered first by two years.

William Walton could also be said to be a Romantic Modernist, though Manze seemed eager to emphasise the avant garde element of his First Symphony. In the outer movements, and even more so in the Scherzo, marked “with malice”, one was reminded more than usual of the fierce intensity of Shostakovich. But Manze also projected a strong sense of long-term structure reminiscent of Sibelius, while the Andante was appropriately bittersweet.

Manze also had a muscular reading of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings. Surprisingly, for a musician steeped in historically informed performance practice, he failed to separate the first and second violins — an arrangement Elgar would have taken for granted — sacrificing the antiphonal effect built into the music.

Available on BBC iPlayer until April 9

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