Sibelius's Third Symphony may be one of the masterpieces of musical compression, but it unfolded as a vast and unpredictable odyssey in Colin Davis's performance with the London Symphony Orchestra. The opening section generated a huge momentum, but as soon as it had reached a climax, the music's energy suddenly dissipated, leaving only a hollow texture of first violins, doubles basses, and the delicate tracery of a solitary flute line.
Davis made this music a weird musical limbo, as if revealing a still, slow current underneath the frenetic activity of the rest of the movement. For all the power of the moment when the main theme returned, it was the strange music in the coda that was the real culmination of the structure: a massive, chorale-like transformation of the movement's themes.
Davis's mastery of the complexities of Sibelius's music, its shimmering detail and granite-hewn background, made the slow movement both melancholy and elemental. Beneath the woodwind's folk-like melody trod a lugubrious double-bass line, which seemed to exist in another musical time from the rest of the orchestra. The finale began as a scherzo-like flurry of different themes, but this chaotic maelstrom gradually coalesced into a powerful melody for violas and cellos, taken up by the rest of the orchestra. Davis's fast speeds created a musical whirlwind that hurtled sin gle-mindedly to the final, hammered chords.
Hilary Hahn was the soloist in Elgar's Violin Concerto, but Davis and the orchestra were again the stars of the performance, moulding the orchestral sections of the first movement with delicacy, and creating an atmosphere of moving nostalgia. Hahn is still only 23, and although her technical accomplishment was impressive, her playing was predictable and expressively limited. She played the solo part as a one-dimensional showpiece, only coming into her own in the virtuosic figuration of the outer movements. Even in the accompanied cadenza of the finale - the dramatic heart of the whole piece, with its world-weary meditation on themes from earlier movements - she did not create any Elgarian magic; it was left to Davis and the LSO players to reveal the melancholy of the music's emotional world.
