Review: Elgar's Cello Concerto at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall ****1/2

This week the Phil announced its new season for 2025-26, unveiling a programme bursting with goodies including a clutch of world and UK premieres and anniversary celebrations.

But that’s on the other side of the summer, and back here in May the current season is still in full swing and with plenty to enjoy.

Including, amid a frenetic few away days for the Phil – sandwiched between a flying (literally) visit to Dublin and a jaunt to the brightly painted ancient Essex market town of Saffron Walden plus a date at the Barbican – a ‘home game’ at Hope Street for a lively and iridescent-hued concert.

A home fixture for the orchestra and Domingo Hindoyan, and a return visit for the gifted Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández following Dvořák’s Cello Concerto two years ago, this time bringing a tender sensibility and wonderful intonation to the concert hall perennial that is Elgar’s masterful work.

Ferrández played the piece in several dates in the States last year, including an appearance in Boston with Hindoyan, and a practically capacity Philharmonic Hall audience reaped the rewards of this with a performance where every passage was carefully considered and every note sang.

He worked long, smooth, expansive lines through the concerto’s opening rhapsodic lament, savouring the legato phrasing and shifting dynamics, and with the clarity of his cello matched by the orchestra – the accompaniment so pin sharp it occasionally got perilously close to clipped.

An agile second movement, showcasing impressive technique, gave way to a powerful, plaintive adagio (its lyrical emotion maintained despite some high decibel level coughing in the hall) and a finale which brought the whole together – the work’s diametric melancholy and exuberance - in perfect balance.

Above: Cellist Pablo Ferrández. Photo by Kristian Schuller.

It garnered a well-deserved ovation which was rewarded with an encore, and how nice to also see the warm applause Ferrández himself had for the orchestra.

The Elgar sat at the heart of a compact, cleverly contrasting programme, bookended by Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos as a sprightly limb loosener and then Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances after the interval.

The orchestra recorded Fandangos a couple of years ago on an all-Sierra album, and here live and unleashed the work’s sunny, infectious – at times almost psychedelic - exploration of the dance form was a hypnotic, harmonic delight, with Hindoyan keeping a light but firm hand on its complex, colourful combination of rhythm and melody.

Plenty of rhythm and melody too in Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, written in (wartime) exile in the US in the twilight of his career and full of nods to some of his previous ‘hits’.

With Hindoyan particularly animated on the podium, the Phil conjured a contagiously vivid performance, with a mystical and uneasy G minor waltz at its heart and plenty of drama, drive and energy in a final movement bursting with big extravagant melodic passages and a punchy ‘danse macabre’ which swept the evening to a close.