Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra at Symphony hall, Birmingham, review

By Ivan Hewett Published: 5:47PM GMT 03 March 2010

How to have a splash, if youre a middle-ranking band with a rather unsexy name, from a nation similar to Holland where there isnt a good local convention of orchestral song to action as a job card? The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic has come up with a good answer. For their stream UK debate theyre focusing on sentimental and 20th-century Russian song to give the programmes coherence, and theyre behaving with Simon Trpceski, one of the stand of immature Eastern European pianists right away creation such big waves in the low-pitched world.

These were good moves, since the low-pitched connectors essentially worked. When the clarinet tune that launches Prokofievs 3rd Piano Concerto began, it felt as if we were still in the vast open spaces evoked in the initial piece: Mussorgskys "Dawn on the Moscow River" from his show Khovanshchina.

Simon Trpceski and the London Philharmonic, examination Barnstorming by Bartk, Barbican - examination Obituary: Sir Edward Downes Mark Wigglesworth: Shostakovichs Symphony No 4, CD examination Aldeburgh Festival: BBC Symphony Orchestra/Carter & Aimard, examination

But in the end, usually one plan unequivocally counts, and thats giving a stirring opening - that is what we got. It usually indispensable a notation or so of the Mussorgsky to convince us that this is a unequivocally excellent band; the opening chords had that special heat of undiluted tuning, the joins in between the woodwind solos were all impeccably dull off.

The band has an additional good item in the figure of the song director, Jaap outpost Zweden. A short, strenuously built man, some-more endangered with expressivity than elegance, he has the good present of creation each impulse appear obligatory and important.

He was well-matched in Simon Trpceski, who has a noble approach of seizing the rhythms so that they appear roughly early but not quite. Together they brought an extraordinary edge-of-the chair fad to Prokofievs concerto, but the most appropriate impulse came in a tranced thoroughfare in the initial movement, when clarinet, bassoon and Trpceskis left-hand musings were intermingled. Suddenly, among all the tumult, we had the cognisance of cover music.

Then came the Rachmaninov 2nd Symphony, a square that has copiousness of opportunities to revelry in sentimental tune and prolonged sunset-glow cadences drawn out to sentimental length all of that outpost Zweden seized. But the song never seemed sentimental, since he brought a really modern-seeming coercion to the music. The consistent earnings of the fanfare-like tune in the Scherzo had the inexplicable, blazing power of a be scared attack.

Van Zweden and his band are a noble group lets goal we listen to some-more of them.