LCO/Ashkenazy review – conductor and players in compelling rapport

Cadogan Hall, London
Every rhythmic detail from Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony was teased out, and cellist Alexey Stadler gave an expressive reading of Elgar

The London Chamber Orchestra has been an unassuming but popular fixture in the capital’s teeming musical life since 1921. A series of recent concerts at Cadogan Hall represents a conscious attempt to raise its profile, and this concert under Vladimir Ashkenazy, who is the LCO’s president, showed an ensemble which is well able to carve out a more ambitious niche.

It was perhaps foreseeable that the most consistently impressive musicianship came in Shostakovich’s so-called Chamber Symphony, Rudolf Barshai’s orchestration of the composer’s eighth string quartet, one of the defining Shostakovich works. Ashkenazy has this piece in his blood and the solemn and sustained fugato opening, followed by a frenzied allegro molto, showed conductor and players in compelling rapport. Barshai’s orchestration is a fine achievement, and Ashkenazy teased every rhythmic detail out of the piece, while the LCO’s playing of the final movement, with the spacious sweep of the violins against the dark intonings of the lower strings, delivered an authentic pulse of inner warmth beneath the music’s forbidding surface.

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