LPO/Gardner review – magical outing for Tippett’s ‘unplayable’ piano concerto

Royal Festival Hall, London
Coleridge-Taylor’s stately, long-lost Solemn Prelude and a crisp, exploratory interpretation of Elgar’s first symphony completed a trio of English compositions

Three very English but three very different composers – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Michael Tippett and Edward Elgar – made up the London Philharmonic’s latest programme under Edward Gardner. The centrepiece was unquestionable: a rare but thoroughly persuasive outing for Tippett’s fluent yet entangled piano concerto of 1953-55.

It was condemned as unplayable by the soloist Julius Katchen, who walked out shortly before he was due to give the premiere. These days, especially in the hands of Steven Osborne, a champion of the work, that seems an extraordinary misjudgment about a concerto that has proved its staying power. In Osborne’s hands, the concerto was not merely playable but eloquently played. It would be hard to imagine a more convincing account than the one that, playing from the score, he conjured here.

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