Edward Bhesania hears the performance of Roberto Sierra, Elgar and Rachmaninoff at London’s Barbican Hall on 19 May 2025
London audiences rarely get a chance to hear orchestras from elsewhere in the country, and yet the turnout for this concert by the RLPO was surprisingly meagre, despite the crowd-pleasing programme. Those who took the plunge, however, were rewarded with performances easily on a par with orchestras from the capital. Domingo Hindoyan, now in his fourth season as chief conductor, opened with Puerto Rican-born composer Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos, a colourful spotlight on the Spanish dance form – with echoes of Ravel’s Boléro – based on examples by Soler and Boccherini.
Iberia met Albion in Spanish-born Pablo Ferrández’s performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Driven by ardent passion, its intensity – underpinned by a tense, heavily applied vibrato – often sounded overbearing. By the time of the third-movement Adagio we really needed an oasis of calm, but the approach here also was rather pushed. The RLPO’s strings could have been a touch warmer, too, though they proved themselves both agile and fleet-footed in the preceding scherzo-like Allegro molto.
The RLPO seized Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances as a vehicle for display, not least in the driving chords and curlicuing wind lines of the first movement, and the acerbic brass and generous strings of the macabre-tinged second-movement waltz.
EDWARD BHESANIA
Watch: Pablo Ferrández practises Bach’s Prelude in G major from Suite no.1 for solo cello
Read: Between dusk and dawn: Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández presents ‘Moonlight Variations’
The Strad Podcast Episode #23: Pablo Ferrández on Classical cello concertos
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