Royal Festival Hall, London
The Sapporo Symphony Orchestra's London date had been in the schedule long before Japan's earthquake in March. But the tsunami transformed what had been a celebratory 50th birthday visit for the Hokkaido-based orchestra into a benefit concert. Music making, like much else in Japan, is only slowly getting going again. This was inevitably an emotionally charged evening that drew some high-octane playing, especially in Shostakovich's appropriately indomitable Fifth Symphony.
Though the Sapporo orchestra went ahead with their previously announced programme, it was hardly surprising that the one Japanese piece in the concert, Takemitsu's How Slow the Wind, invited extra layers of meditative meaning. With its strong textures and underlying restraint, constantly circling around a wistful phrase with echoes of Debussy's Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune, the 1991 piece showcased the orchestra in more delicate mode.
Just as well, perhaps, since Bruch's G minor violin concerto, which followed, wears its heart very much on its sleeve. Akiko Suwanai gave it the full treatment. This is dazzling rather than lovely playing, in which the unremitting panache of the performance had one wishing that Bruch had possessed some of Takemitsu's restraint and nuance.
Every performance of the Shostakovich is likely to be overshadowed for a while yet by Andris Nelsons's towering account with the LSO in the autumn. But Otaka and his orchestra were almost in the same league. The disciplined austerity of their playing was immensely convincing, with the Sapporo strings particularly impressive. Shostakovich's Fifth was an assertion of musical values in Russia's dark times. Its message was no less unerring today in Japan's.