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Daily Telegraph, Geoffrey Norris, 19th January 2007

Geoffrey Norris reviews the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop at the Lighthouse in Poole

The platform was bare but for brass and percussion at the start of this Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra programme because the curtain-raiser came in the shape of a pair of fanfares.
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Intense: Marin Alsop brings Rachmaninov's orchestration alive
Aaron Copland's familiar Fanfare for the Common Man was complemented by Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. The two are musical twins, Tower's piece – dedicated to Marin Alsop – sharing the Copland's instrumentation and alluding to its thematic material.  But whereas Copland's fanfare exudes solemnity and a sense of striving, Tower's is more volatile and ornamented with instrumental curlicues.

Rather than going down the dangerous road and drawing any gratuitous conclusions about what the music might imply in terms of gender traits, let's just say that both pieces equally raised the roof in celebratory fashion.

The main work in the concert was Rachmaninov's Second Symphony, given a fascinating performance that revealed facets of colour that can sometimes go unnoticed. Alsop has the art of stripping away accretions and accepted interpretative approaches that might have been hallowed by time, and in such a way secured, in the first movement, a striking fusion of languor and momentum: the largo of the introduction was a true, slow one, but by means of a subtle ebb and flow of dynamics and phrasing, its sense of direction was consistently maintained.

Potentially tricky bits of string co-ordination were negotiated with circumspection, a tendency that, on occasion, robbed the music – particularly in the scherzo – of his visceral power.

But the compensations were plentiful, notably in the sort of tension that Alsop could generate in the taut, fraught motivic arguments of the first movement, and the blend of expansiveness and jubilance that imbued the finale.

By maintaining such a keen ear for instrumental timbre, Alsop showed how Rachmaninov's orchestration, while generally reckoned to be lush at this period in his career, is actually alive with individual colours (in the horns and woodwind, for example) and crafted in such a way that the blends of sonority gleam.

In between the fanfares and the symphony, Barry Douglas joined the BSO for Beethoven's Fifth (Emperor) Piano Concerto, a performance that was indeed imperial in the way that lyricism and grandeur, relaxation and sinew, were so purposefully balanced and integrated.

Added to that, Douglas and Alsop seemed to share ideas about the music's boldness, emphatically showing that Beethoven's exploitation both of the orchestra and the piano's capabilities were of radical force.
 
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