Last-minute Heroics

Bernard Haitink and Maria João Pires have a long-standing working relationship and one that has paid great musical dividends. So it was good to see the two on the final version of bill for last night's concert at the Royal Festival Hall, after a changing roster that had included Abbado and Martha Argerich at various junctures. Conducting the Orchestra Mozart in an all-Beethoven programme, Haitink displayed customary insight and verve. Oddly, however brilliant on her own terms, Pires never fully bonded with her collaborators (and vice versa) during the Second Piano Concerto. It was a perplexing performance.

Haitink began the concert with Beethoven's second overture to Leonore. Charting a vast dynamic range, with great variety at the quieter end, Haitink imbued the implicit journey to freedom with vivid theatrical colouring. Spirited, with a dose of post-HIP attack in the upper strings, the lower strings provide a contrasting note of warmth, with brass and a superb woodwind section adding strength and resolve.

That was certainly how Pires approached the Second Piano Concerto, though the slightly reduced Orchestra Mozart took a strange back seat approach. While they gently tapered phrases, Pires seized things by the scruff of the neck, and I wasn't entirely convinced that the orchestra had tuned precisely to the pitch of the chosen Yamaha grand. Things settled in the second movement, which was expansive and aria-like, while in the Finale, the orchestra raised its game, just as Pires had begun to temper her approach. I missed the feral attack she had brought to the first movement, not least in the cadenza, and left for the interval feeling rather disappointed.

The orchestra and Haitink were decidedly more liberated after the break, with a wonderfully fresh performance of the Fourth Symphony. This was the buffa spirit that Pires had offered in the concerto, but to which Orchestra Mozart had decided not to respond (until too late). Superb woodwind playing again, with exquisite intonation, bubbled up beneath the string runs in the Finale. At last Haitink and his players were on target, as they continued to be in their wonderfully hefty rendition of the Egmont Overture. Here the elation and danger promised in the Leonore curtain raiser was realised at least. The Orchestra Mozart and Pires return to the Southbank Centre on Thursday, conducted by Diego Matheuz.

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