When Tugan Sokhiev is old and famous, he may look back at his 20s and feel that he did too much and took too many risks. Even if he does, he is likely to conclude that experience was the best teacher. In the meantime, who can blame him for taking every opportunity given to him on the basis of his undoubted talent and using it with conviction.
Sokhiev's concert with the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, of whom he is music director, was very much standard repertoire, Beethoven and Brahms, lying between the two extremes of Italian verismo opera. With the Beethoven, his instinct seemed to be to highlight the forward-looking romantic, and similarly, in Brahms's Fourth Symphony, to indulge its passion rather than be bound by the constraints of its classical structure.
As an opera orchestra, the WNO band's propensity for lyrical lines is a given; now Sokhiev's preoccupation with beauty of sound seems to be paying dividends, the strings and brass ever more convincing in their fullness of tone. But such concerns of colouring can be at the expense of a precise architectural vision. For all its dramatic fervour, Beethoven's Egmont overture suffered somewhat in that respect.
Peter Donohoe was the soloist in the Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, the Emperor, but with Donohoe the approach is not so much imperious as empirical. The formidable technical power allows him to be as ebullient as ever, and the broad chords and pounding octaves of the first movement had a real ferocity. There were moments when Donohoe - and Sokhiev - threw caution to the winds, but this was an instance where it was far better to be sorry than safe. Donohoe obligingly set up the second half with a reflective Brahms encore, which was reserved compared with the turbulence that Sokhiev then brought to the Fourth Symphony. There were moments that carried a Tchaikovksian resonance, though Tchaikovsky - who once dismissed the music of his German contemporary as "self-inflated mediocrity" - would not have appreciated the gesture.
This was a young man's Brahms, hot-blooded, with even the flute variation of the final chaconne given a huge emotional charge, and to the end fast and furious. Nobility and solidity didn't really come into it - but, for Sokhiev, maybe that is still in the future.
