Promising at the start, orchestra and guest fail to match past achievements
Martina Filjak plays Rachmaninov
Hong Kong Sinfonietta
City Hall Concert Hall
Friday July 8 (one performance only)
The concert started well enough, with guest conductor Sebastian Lang-Lessing reassuring the audience that the opening item, Webern's Variations for Orchestra, had more to its uncompromisingly modern bite than just an incomprehensible series of notes.
Similar in spirit to the works that were to follow, the opener would 'surprise us at every little corner, with deep emotional colours', he said. 'Sometimes one note becoming a melody - capricious, aggressive, tender or sweet.' And the performance certainly delivered the goods, with delicately applied nuances to the often pointillistic - or minutely detailed - sounds.
Lang-Lessing promised the same for Brahms' Second Symphony, which was tantalising because it was just the makeover it needed to explode the perception that Brahms' music should sound like fudge because the composer was unashamedly conservative. However, the performance of the four movements of the Second Symphony was starved of differentiation of character - mostly too loud and questionably fast.
This was not the Sinfonietta's finest hour; the opening bars left that in no doubt. The performance was unworthy of comparison with some of the ensemble's impressive achievements, both in the direction it received and the delivery it gave.
The strings were skewered onto the unremittingly gutsy sound encouraged by Lang-Lessing, although that was occasionally pleasant. Furthermore, the brass were unreliable, unbalanced and, in the final bars, seemingly unco-operative in gilding the climax.
Many in the audience had probably come to hear Rachmaninov's ever-popular Piano Concerto No 2, an ideal fix to start the weekend wind-down. But conductor and soloist need to introduce some original thought and make a case for people not to stay at home to enjoy it on CD. Soloist Martina Filjak raised hopes with an unusually teasing opening. Those chords took much longer than usual to sprout into incandescence, while Lang-Lessing signalled from the start that he was not interested in faux-romantic swooning from phrase to phrase. That gave the opening movement a macho drive that certainly had its attractions.
But there was no follow-through: the slow movement started much too fast, undermining the contrasts of the central section. Filjak's technical control had questionable patches; and chemistry between Filjak and the orchestra was scant, at times sounding like separate performances running concurrently.
