This was a night that belonged to a prodigious young talent. No, not Welsh National Opera's new music director Tugan Sokhiev, but the Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan, who is, at 17, eight years his junior.
Two years ago, Khachatryan won the Sibelius violin competition with the Sibelius concerto. Here he played the work with the assurance of one who knew he had come a long way since that time. He is clearly an exceptionally gifted musician, possessed of a masterly technique.
This performance was impressive for its restraint and the sparing use of effect. The tone he produced was incredibly beautiful: a subtly veiled yet glowing sound, particularly striking in the low, rich melodies at the heart of the concerto and, in the vivid finale, exultant without empty rhetoric.
Perhaps an even better indication of Khachatryan's long-term potential was his unaccompanied encore, which was an exercise in purity of intention and execution. His performance of the Adagio from Bach's First Partita revealed a staggering control and maturity, and its effect was at once magical and chastening.
The programme had opened with Barber's Adagio for Strings. Sokhiev offered an interpretation that was less elegiac than has become usual. In preserving some of the intimacy of the original string-quartet scoring, he ultimately made the intensity of the final bars more eloquent.
But Sokhiev came into his own in Rachmaninov's Second Symphony, in which he was concerned not so much with concept as with beauty and body of sound. Certainly the WNO strings had a searing intensity of colour in the sweeping, luscious melodies of the vast first movement. The Scherzo, with its fugal trio, was ebullient and muscular, giving way to a contemplative yet deeply felt slow movement. Sokhiev drew all this together in a finale that was fuelled with a quiet but relentless passion.
Of his talent there can be no doubt, but the pressures and demands on the music director of a major company are infinitely greater than those on a soloist or young conductor. If Sokhiev is able, in the coming months, to bring the same authority to the theatre as he does to the concert hall, WNO need have no worries. Time will tell.
