Barbican, London
Valery Gergiev has always conducted Tchaikovsky uncommonly well, and his cycle of the symphonies, spread out over two seasons, is proving to be among the most consistently successful of his achievements with the London Symphony Orchestra. This concert found him tackling the Third, the least frequently performed of the set.
The work's neglect is a mystery. Its five-movement structure – flanking a melancholy central andante with two scherzos and a pair of ceremonial outer movements – is striking. The symphony shares its emotional world, meanwhile, with Tchaikovsky's ballets and operas, in which private passions and public personae interweave and clash.
Gergiev was alert to its complex shifts in mood in an interpretation that was full of surprises. We think of him as favouring speed, but here he allowed the opening movement and closing polonaise to unfold with slow, majestic grandeur. The waltz-like first scherzo was done with suavity and grace, the second altogether more startling and ambiguous. There was a huge surge of emotion in the andante, meanwhile, that seemed to resonate beyond its close, colouring the rest of the work with its sadness.
Music by Shostakovich formed the first half of the programme: the Concerto for Trumpet, Piano and Strings followed by the Second Piano Concerto. Yefim Bronfman, the pianist in both, used a score for the Second in an underpowered performance that was laid-back rather than energetic. The Concerto for Trumpet, however, found him at his most mercurial and elegant, though it was trumpeter Philip Cobb who eventually became its real hero, playing the languid solo in the second movement with a bluesy poise that was breathtaking, dazzling everyone with his virtuosity in the finale.