Review: Liverpool Mozart Orchestra at the Tung Auditorium ****

How do you mark 75 years of music making in Liverpool? How about by inviting the city’s most famous (non-Beatle) musical export to launch your special anniversary?

Wishful thinking? Reaching for the stars? It turned out not for the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra whose opening concert of its 75^th season serendipitously coincided with a rare visit home for its illustrious president Sir Simon Rattle, in town to open a European tour with his own current outfit the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Thus, while four busloads of Munich musicians were en route to Hope Street from Manchester Airport, Rattle hotfooted it up the street to the Tung Auditorium with his baton to get the LMO’s November concert off to a flying start.

Still with the bouncing head of curls he had when, aged 21, he conducted the orchestra back in 1976, albeit now snowy white, Rattle guided the musicians through Haydn’s The Representation of Chaos (the overture to the Creation which the LMO is performing next May).

The smooth, sustained diminuendo from the opening fortissimo blast was neatly realised (although I’d have liked a bit more initial punch) and elsewhere Rattle worked deftly to keep the sound crisp and sharp. While occasionally the overall tone felt like it needed burnishing, there was a lovely mellow mini clarinet solo to savour.

Incidentally, music by Haydn also opened the LMO’s first ever concert, at the Bluecoat Hall in May 1951, although on that occasion it was his Clock Symphony.

Above: Sir Simon Rattle with the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra. Photo by Gareth Jones.

The orchestra’s own current conductor, Robin Wallington, took over proceedings for the remainder of the evening in which the LMO, having conquered the perhaps slightly daunting experience of being led by Rattle (albeit at least one of its number was an old compatriot from his Merseyside Youth Orchestra days), went from strength to strength.

One of the LMO’s remits has always been to support early career artists in its programming, and rising cellist James Heathcote (who is also a pianist and conductor/musical director) impressed here in Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor.

Schumann, creatively energised by a recent move from Dresden to Dusseldorf, composed the concerto in the space of two weeks in October 1850, and there is a sense of fizzing freedom and vivacity about it, not least in the virtuosic and busy cello part.

The three movements are played through without a break in what is one long musical storytelling arc, and Heathcote brought both eloquence and agility to the technically challenging exacting solo part, along with plenty of stamina.

There was also a pleasing cohesiveness in the interplay between cellist and orchestra, not least in the expansive second movement with its mini duet between soloist and principal cello and in the accompanied cadenza of the buoyant finale.

Heathcote returned for an encore, offering an interesting choice in Imogen Holst’s A Fall of the Leaf.

Above: James Heathcote performs Schumann's Cello Concerto with the LMO. Photo by Gareth Jones.

If Sir Simon Rattle opened the first half, the second brought a world premiere in Wallington’s own work Gaia, composed apparently on holiday in Normandy where he contemplated how increasingly extreme weather might effect permanent change on his surroundings.

A cataclysmic opening (it must have been a stormy day in France, or else the calvados was to blame) resolved into a discordant, febrile evocation of nature which itself slowly subsided into tentative and intermittent birdsong evoked through the winds, and then – cleverly – segued seamlessly into the opening bars of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

If Wallington opted to take the opening allegro ma non troppo as though the ‘non’ was simply a speed advisory, the propulsive pace he set did give the movement a visceral sense of joie de vivre.

The andante second movement was crafted with lovely, warm tones from the orchestra and some delightful work from the woodwind, particularly in the interplay between flute and oboe.

That carried on in a brisk and evocative whirligig scherzo, while the orchestra produced such a powerful fortissimo boom at the outset of the fourth movement it made me wish they could go back and have a second go at the opening of the Creation.

There was no time for that though, with Wallington driving his forces through the tumult to the glorious sunburst melody of Beethoven’s finale.