Conductor Ingo Metzmacher and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard are so closely linked with musical modernism in the public imagination that the thought of them tackling Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto together might raise a few eyebrows. Aimard, however, has recently gravitated towards Romanticism, recording the complete Beethoven concertos with Nikolaus Harnoncourt. In Germany, meanwhile, Metzmacher, is known for a broader musical spectrum than we are accustomed to hearing him perform in the UK, carefully scheduling the modernist works he champions alongside radical, yet thoughtful, reappraisals of the mainstream repertoire.
As might be expected, their performance of Beethoven's Third with the London Philharmonic Orchestra was riveting, idiosyncratic and at times maddening - a deconstruction and reconstruction of the work, in some respects, rather than an interpretation. At every point, the concerto sounded pivotal and allusive, less like Beethoven than it should, with a first movement that peered back to the elation and profundity of late Mozart and a Largo of operatic waywardness and beauty that flashed forward to the heady fluidity of Chopin.
It proved provocative enough to rouse a buzz of heated discussion in the interval, though few could have doubts about what followed: a performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony that was second to none. The work itself remains contentious. Faced with charges of formalism, Shostakovich withdrew the score shortly after its composition, refused to allow a public hearing until 1961 and disparaged the symphony as structurally weak. Many interpreters present it as a tragic statement that links the Mahlerian language of imperial decadence with Soviet oppression, though Metzmacher terrifyingly tips it into violent mania.
The vast, howling blocks of sound, wedged together to form the multiple climaxes of the first movement, seem not so much Mahlerian as constructivist. Metzmacher turned the central movement into a rancid waltz that suddenly imploded into a miasma of ticking clocks as time itself seemed to run out. The finale - with its grim marches and parades finally giving way to a glacial, numbing landscape in which an isolated celeste fumbled through extended string chords - was harrowing, almost beyond endurance. The LPO's playing was at once detailed and furious, with every note and nuance hair-raisingly in place. A flawed concert overall, perhaps, though the Shostakovich was the greatest performance of the work I've heard in recent years.
