The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s three concerts this week are the last that Riccardo Chailly will conduct in London as its chief. He steps down as Gewandhaus kapellmeister next summer to concentrate on his work as music director of La Scala, Milan, and to take over the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Chailly’s previous residencies at the Barbican with the Gewandhaus have featured the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms; the focus this time is on Richard Strauss: six of the tone poems are being performed, as well as the late string elegy Metamorphosen.
Chailly began at the beginning with Don Juan, the work with which Strauss, aged 25, announced himself to the world as a master of orchestral scene-painting. Chailly’s performance teemed with all that orchestral detail and fizzed with youthful energy; every section of Ein Heldenleben, with which the concert ended, was equally vivid. Strauss himself conducted the Gewandhaus orchestra for almost half a century, and its sound seems embedded as deeply in his music’s perfectly phrased moments of repose as in the overripe textures and monumental climaxes. The way in which Chailly built the final moments of Heldenleben, described wonderfully in Stephen Johnson’s programme note as “Strauss’s shameless symphonic ‘selfie’”, was a model, if not of restraint exactly, then of very precisely targeted sonic engineering.
Magnificent though that sound is, there’s need for some relief from the aural barrage in these concerts, and each of them contains a Mozart concerto too. Maria João Pires was the understated soloist in the final piano concerto, in B flat K595. Perhaps too much so: for all its fluency and uncomplicated musicality, Pires’s playing seemed at times rather detached and unspecific. Chailly accompanied his scaled-down orchestra attentively, sometimes reducing the string sound even further to just the first desks to emphasise the chamber-music qualities of Pires’s playing, and perhaps to make the contrast with Strauss’s bombastic self-aggrandisement even more pointed.
• At Barbican, London, 22 and 23 October. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
