Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Libor Pešek, Cadogan Hall

Martinu Double Violin Concerto steals the show in an otherwise doddery performance

by Igor ToronyilalicTuesday, 02 February 2010

You can't ever expect immediate liftoff from a rusty old Lada. Spluttering, shaking and rattling make up as much of the first few minutes of the experience as that of actually moving. But then, before you know it, you're halfway to Plovdiv, and you wonder what you were complaining about. It's what happened last night with Libor Pešek's Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Juddering through the first two pieces (the Polonaise from Dvořák's Rusalka and Smetana's winning Polka from The Bartered Bride) at leaden tempi, the stringed body barely hanging on, the brass and percussion engine sputtering into action, you wondered whether the orchestral banger would make it to the Martinů concerto. But it did. And, once there, with all the orchestral cogs now warmed up, this ancient rust-bucket really began to move. And pretty musically too.

To say that the Martinů Double Violin Concerto is a good work is to my ears a criminal understatement. The piece is a mid-20th-century stunner: sunny, lucid and packed with a Lada-ful of ear-tugging tunes. It deserves far more attention than it gets. It's not the Martinů that many may expect to hear. Last year's Martinů festivities focused - not completely erroneously - on the brooding side of his oeuvre, most of which hails from the 1930s and 1940s, when, like most central Europeans, Martinů was more than a little preoccupied.

In 1948 he became the chair of composition at Princeton University, and began to relax, producing some spanking tonal works in the process. One can almost imagine him composing his Double Violin Concerto as a response to his growing acceptance of and satisfaction in America. There's a modern, vehicular chug to the rhythms of all the movements. The first is perhaps the most skittishly infectious. The Moderato middle movement, in which a naggingly near-familiar tune is passed around the soloists and then the orchestra and then discarded, bleeds almost seamlessly into the Allegro con brio final movement, in which the two violinists face off in a thrilling wrestle to the death. There was almost something homo-(or, more accurately, violin-)erotic about the way the fight became a tight, almost unhitchable embrace.

So much joy came from the soloists' performances - and not just from their music-making. With a red dickie bow peering from the top of his chin rest, what looked like a napkin tucked into his shirt and a loose double-breasted dinner jacket flapping widely about his portly frame, Antonín Hradil - his head buried in the score - looked like he'd been picked up from the local diner. Both he and co-soloist Jiři Hurník, their bodies on the energetic move, were as thick as thieves in their playing, dodging the onslaught of the orchestra (who matched them all the way) like some ne'er-do-well double-act.

It was auguring well for the Dvořák Ninth Symphony to come. But sadly, the New World was a step too far for the Lada. From the start, the wayward strings resembled, for the most part, a choppy sea - and not in a good way. Even brass and woodwind - who often had a resplendent tonal colour to them - were scrappy in their entries and exits. Nothing was being finessed or defined or phrased even in a basic sense by Pešek. He simply beat and bowed. The orchestra were very willing and able to let the melodic money notes ring out but beyond that this was a New World to pass over.

But then, with a firecracker of an encore, Dvořák's Slavonic Dance, Op 72 No 7, a rumbustious, rustic little piece, full of infectious syncopated tuttis, doubt crept in. Was this Lada really destined for the scrap heap? Of course, the irony is that the Czech National Symphony Orchestra is one of the Czech Republic's newest orchestras, founded in 1992. A private enterprise from a country that used to supply the 19th-century Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with their best players should be doing much better than this. And there was an inkling in the Martinů and in certain fleeting individual solos that - with a more involved conductor - they could indeed one day do much better. However, for now, this is an orchestra badly in need of a rigorous MOT.

The Czech National Philharmonic Orchestra under Libor Pešek continue to perform at the Cadogan Hall all week as part of the Zurich International Concert Series

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