LPO/Alsop, Festival Hall - review - Music - Arts

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Playing one Liszt piano concerto is taxing enough for most pianists; last night Hough played both and barely broke sweat.

He certainly has the power for the frenzied pounding that, especially in the First Concerto, Liszt throws down as a challenge to the soloist.

Yet there was also brooding lyricism and moments of reflective calm that Hough imbued with his own highly personal poetry.

His playful sense of rhythm and timing made time stand still in the few pauses that Liszt allows, and the London Philharmonic and conductor Marin Alsop had to be on their toes to follow his lead.

In what turned out to be a very long concert, Alsop chose to follow the Liszt concertos with Dvorák's Eighth Symphony. It felt like the calm after the storm; if anything, the performance was a little too well-behaved but the music's ebullience shone through, not least in the solo playing of guest leader Lisa Schatzman.

Where Dvorák's Eighth feels pastoral, Bohuslav Martinu's Sixth, a rarity given a welcome outing, feels more cinematic but it's more than mood music.

Written in the Fifties, during and just after Martinu spent time in the US, the symphony - its subtitle is Fantaisies Symphoniques - marries the uneasy twitchiness of film noir with a sense of unrequited longing that wouldn't look out of place in a Western.

LPO/Alsop
Festival Hall
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
SE1 8XX