Reviews: Beethoven's home town orchestra

Classical music:

Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn

Royal Festival Hall, London

Expectations for an authentically "Beethovenian" experience from the 101-year-old Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn were disappointed on Sunday afternoon by a pretty unmemorable last leg of the orchestra's current tour. The band itself produces a warm body of tone, with brass and woodwinds stealing a qualitative lead over the strings. The concert opened to a fairly vigorous account of the Egmont Overture, though the principal conductor, Marc Soustrot, had nothing to say about the piece that hasn't been better said countless times before. After Egmont we heard a fitfully successful Violin Concerto, where the soloist was Raphael Oleg, 1986 winner of the Tchaikovsky competition. The Violin Concerto is a sticky interpretative hurdle: play it too broadly, or with excessive reverence, and it sounds repetitive and uneventful; play it too fast, and the musical point tends to lose focus. The trick is to balance emotion and architecture, spirit and spirituality; and although Oleg could - and sometimes did - draw a warm thread of tone from his bow (his account of the slow movement's glorious central melody was indeed ravishing), he invariably sounded either impatient, over-intense or indifferent.

True, an intrusive fit of audience coughing rather spoiled the Larghetto's opening measures, but most of the problems harked back to an uninvolving first movement, where soloist and orchestra seemed oddly incompatible.

The last "official" item was an energetic but untidy performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, where Soustrot's first movement fluctuated between genuine brio and banal bombast and the noble slow movement passed by like a tired processional. The Scherzo's blustery trio was less than pristine and the explosive transition into the finale lacked tension. Elsewhere, blurred articulation and over-hasty climaxes meant that the sum effect was undistinguished. The orchestra from Beethoven's home town might at least have graced us with key repeats in the Scherzo and Finale; but, no, this was just another routine Beethoven Fifth. Fortunately, an encore offered us a glimpse of Soustrot's potential.

A movement from Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin will have struck some listeners as a bizarre follow-up to Beethoven's Fifth, but the Minuet was graced by sensitive phrasing and attractive woodwind playing - and explained the presence of a harp, which, till then, no one had had reason to play.