Over recent years Roger Norrington has pushed ideas of authenticity in performance right up to composers as relatively recent as Mahler and Vaughan Williams. It is proof that this approach is not exhausted that even now he can make Schubert's Ninth Symphony, on the cusp of romanticism but basically a classical work, sound surprising, although on this occasion it did not achieve its full impact.
Though the Philharmonia play on modern instruments, Norrington cajoled them into employing something close to classical style. Most obviously this meant a sparing use of vibrato, which led to an often attractive rawness in the sound of the winds, but also meant that the moments of uncertain tuning in the strings were laid mercilessly bare.
The other really striking feature of Norrington's approach is his famously fleet tempos. In Mozart's overture to Don Giovanni, his beat for the ominous opening was fast enough to allow the second section of the piece to skip along while keeping to the same underlying pulse. However, the same composer's D major Violin Concerto sounded more relaxed and refined, thanks partly to some sensitive work from the soloist, Benjamin Schmid. He blended well with the orchestra, playing along unobtrusively with the first violins in the introduction, then switching to a soloistic tone that was silvery sweet rather than overly rich. He raised a relieved eyebrow after expertly negotiating his virtuosic first-movement cadenza - but then, as he had written it himself, he had no one else to blame. He seemed less at ease, though, in Schubert's Rondo in A, and did not dust it off with quite the required butter-wouldn't-melt charm.
The Schubert symphony formed the weightier half of the programme. Norrington zipped through it in under 50 minutes, the first and second movements feeling especially light and speedy. But with the orchestra using this no-nonsense style of playing, the tempo sounded right. The opening horn melody positively lilted; the winds took it over, accenting it so it went with an insistent, almost clumsy swing. Lines emerged from within the transparent textures that often pass unnoticed. Yet something was lost as well, and we missed the rich sonorities that can, at the climaxes of this work, be an elemental force in their own right. The performance did not create the intensity that might justify the symphony's nickname - the Great - but it was still revealing in its way.
