Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Karabits, Festival Hall - music review

Early in the 20th century, a German critic labelled England "the land without music". Edward Elgar is often cited as evidence to the contrary but in fact he might have agreed. In a lecture he is supposed to have said: "English music is white — it evades everything." It wasn’t a racial comment but an observation about the lack of emotional colour in English music.

Not his own, of course. His best loved piece, the Cello Concerto, evades nothing, embraces everything. Steven Isserlis has a long, profound association with the concerto; his performance last night was inward-looking, his pacing neither rushed nor lugubrious. His cello sounded rich and mournful, its low moan occasionally sliding towards a plaintive whine. Meanwhile, he tossed his greying curls, his face taking on the ecstatic anguish of a martyred saint.

Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits kept the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on Isserlis’s wavelength, occasionally allowing his players to overpower the cello, only for Isserlis to re-assert himself heroically.

Karabits opened the concert with Prokofiev’s First Symphony, the so-called Classical, a work that can sometimes sound flaccid. Here it had bounce a-plenty and a sly wit that was almost Mozartian in its pithiness. There was nothing pithy about Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a heady orchestral fantasy that gave the RPO woodwind section the chance to put on some oriental sparkle.

The clarinet and bassoon, in particular, enjoyed their fleeting solos, while Clio Gould wrung every ounce of colour from the violin’s repeated rhapsodies. If there was something blowsy about the climax, this is a work that can stand a little healthy vulgarity.