Bruce Hodges visits Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson Hall on 25 October 2025 for the performance of Sibelius, Jennifer Higdon, Tchaikovsky and Josef Rheinberger
It is hard to overstate the tonal lustre that Lisa Batiashvili brought to Sibelius’s Violin Concerto – unusually positioned at the opening of this concert – which handsomely showed the colours of her 1739 Joseph Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ instrument.
It also didn’t hurt that she has worked often with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, as their acclaimed recordings attest. The conductor sensitively kept the Philadelphia forces flowing yet damped – some might say, slightly too much – but the result was a quiet backdrop that allowed every detail of the violinist’s probing lines to be heard.
As an unusual encore, the violinist returned for Josef Rheinberger’s Evening Song, gracefully arranged by Jarkko Riihimäki to include the entire ensemble.
A different kind of string goodness happened in Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra, which I hadn’t heard since its 2002 Philadelphia premiere with Wolfgang Sawallisch. With all respect to the late conductor, Nézet-Séguin better internalised the work’s energy and insouciance, heightening its contrasts.
Among memorable sequences for the entire ensemble were those with string principals – leader David Kim, second violin Kimberly Fisher, violist Choong-Jin Chang and cellist Hai-Ye Ni – as an impromptu string quartet, backed by clouds of chimes, glockenspiel, xylophone, wood block and whip crack.
The afternoon closed with Tchaikovsky’s Francesca di Rimini, which causes strong opinions among listeners. My approach to the composer’s overheated ode is to imagine gazing at a rocky ocean promontory, as orchestral waves dash up against the cliffs. In this case, the overwhelming Philadelphia string contingent was hard to resist.
BRUCE HODGES
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