It has never been easy to bring off the colossal demands of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Its allegory of resistance against the forces of evil, reflecting the long and stoic fight of the people of Leningrad against the invasion of Hitler's army, may have been a simpler exercise for its earliest interpreters. In the 1970s, the suggestion that its dominating march was actually Shostakovich's depiction of Stalinist horror complicated the issue. Now, hearing the symphony played by Sinfonia Cymru - average age about 23 - was to experience a performance whose passion and solidarity became a vast anti-war statement.
Conductor Gareth Jones chose to eschew the overtly bombastic or banal in favour of a more straightforward approach, letting the music speak for itself. There were some astutely judged moments. Rather than have the snare drum strike up the rhythm which pervades the opening allegretto in its normal, militaristic position high at the back, the sound emerged only as the merest suspicion of a rhythm, with the percussionist tucked in behind the violas, almost invisible but immediately arresting. The cumulative effect over the space of the whole movement was then all the more powerful. In the two central movements, the sense of controlled detachment often brought a chilling clarity. While this could not entirely validate the stretches which are numbingly static, Sinfonia Cymru managed to maintain the momentum, the last triumphal flourish achieved with exemplary precision.
Sinfonia Cymru is normally a chamber orchestra taken from a 100-strong pool of young professionals or would-be's, but this annual foray into premier league repertoire is a test of their talent. Here, they passed with honour. It was further testimony to their highly responsive playing that a pianist of Jean-Phillippe Collard's stature should return to perform Prokofiev's Third Concerto with them. Collard's crystalline technique was astonishing and his poised balancing of dark and expressive - and the periodic explosions of tension between the two - served as significant pointers to the Leningrad Symphony to come.
