Mikhail Pletnev's appearances as a conductor are steadily becoming as unmissable as his performances as a pianist. Unlike many of his colleagues who have made the transition from piano stool to podium, his baton technique is a model of economy, with the smallest gestures conveying the maximum meaning and a sense of sovereign control over what is expected from the orchestra, and the results get better and better.
The main work in the second of Pletnev's concerts with the Philharmonia was Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. It is not that many years since a visiting Russian conductor would have cut swathes through the work, following the domestic tradition that used to regard Rachmaninov's symphonic invention as over-elaborate and over-extended. It was conductors in the west who showed how Rachmaninov's architecture had its own logic, and here was Pletnev rightly insisting on including every bar, and moulding them all into a totally convincing symphonic architecture, in which the moments of tension and drama were as memorable as the work's pools of lyricism.
The coda to the first movement, superbly played by the Philharmonia, took on an extra urgency, as if preparing the way for the scherzo that follows immediately; the finale had inexhaustible energy with enough kept in reserve to make the last bars overwhelming; and the famous slow movement was effortlessly refined - its final diminuendo into nothingness was a very classy bit of string playing indeed.
The first half of the concert, not quite at the same level, had been devoted to Sibelius. It was good to hear The Bard, least performed and most elusive of his mature tone poems, which seems to evaporate before it has really started.
But Janine Jansen's account of the Violin Concerto was more hit and miss. Although technically excellent and wholeheartedly committed, it never really focused the work's expressive power convincingly on the violin line. Too often attention wandered to what Pletnev was doing with the orchestral accompaniment, though that was sometimes very interesting indeed.
