Billed as "a sparkling evening with Mikhail Pletnev" but with the star pianist absent, this started as a not-quite-so-effervescent evening with Dmitri Alexeev. Teams of the London Symphony Orchestra's top players had been assembled for two chamber works; the thinking had probably been to throw the unpredictable Pletnev into the mix, stand back and see what happened. But Alexeev is a less volatile element than his compatriot, and the hoped-for sparks took time to arrive.
Beethoven's Op 16 Quintet for Piano and Winds started promisingly enough, the four wind instruments matching the piano's clean tone. Though the odd note went astray, Alexeev was a reliable source of momentum. Having returned to the foreground after the nicely sustained wind solos of the second movement, he played his scurrying lines in the finale with bravado while the winds marked out nonchalantly perky melodies above. Yet the work never quite took flight - and to be honest, the wind players, in the unfamiliar and not entirely comfortable position of being alone on the platform, didn't really look as though they expected it to.
Still, it's hard to appear engaging and engaged when your instrument requires you to keep relatively still. At the other end of the scale is the violinist Gordan Nikolitch, regular leader of the LSO, whose fidgety, foot-flapping brilliance can be relied upon to brighten up the least promising programme.
Dvorak's Piano Quintet Op 81 and the presence of Nikolitch brought out a stronger character in Alexeev's playing, something that rubbed off on the other strings, especially in the two overtly Czech middle movements. Edward Vanderspar's viola melody set the dark, melancholy and decidedly bohemian tone for the slower episodes of the second, with Nikolitch bringing a rhythmically taut skittishness to the livelier interjections. And the almost mechanically rattling melody of the third sent Alexeev's hands spinning so far up the keyboard, it seemed they might fall off. The strings did sound a bit lost in this hall, but at least they provided something for Alexeev to spark off, a compliment promptly returned.
