Carl Nielsen's 1911 Violin Concerto does not get many outings. While as technically demanding as any in the repertoire, it lacks the obvious opportunities for matinee-idol display or the show-stopping melodies that ensure the popularity of its Romantic predecessors. For all that, it is a highly distinguished piece of work, articulate in its borrowing of the baroque sonata form of movements in a slow-fast-slow-fast sequence and in the heightened individuality of its thematic material.
It made an ideal vehicle for the musicianship of the Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos in his appearance with the London Philharmonic under Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä. From a visual point of view, Kavakos is the least showy of top-rank violinists, but his command of nuances of tonal colour is outstanding and found full expression in his authoritative reading. With Vänskä and the LPO providing support that was discreet or assertive as required, this was the highlight of their programme.
It began with the most durable work of the self-styled "brazen romantic" Arnold Bax, his tone-poem Tintagel, inspired both by the Arthurian associations of the Cornish cliff-top castle (with an appropriate quotation from Wagner's Tristan) and by his steamy affair with the pianist Harriet Cohen. The players revelled in its glamorous seascape atmospherics, though Vänskä was unable to hide the joins and non-sequiturs in its structure.
Likewise, the performance of Rachmaninov's Third Symphony in the second half did not quite come off. The music's constant ambiguities needed more of a virtuoso flourish, and more careful attention to mood and details of rhythm and balance, to work their emotionally complex trick.
