Partway through a Prokofiev symphony cycle to mark the 70th anniversary of the composer’s death, Gianandrea Noseda and the London Symphony Orchestra have reached the relatively unfamiliar Fourth, a work with a curious history. Re-using music from the 1929 ballet The Prodigal Son, it exists in two radically different versions that are so far apart in style and aims as to constitute two separate works. Prokofiev allocated them different opus numbers, and the jury is still out on which is preferable: the lean, taut 1930 original, premiered in Boston the same year, or the altogether grander 1947 rewrite, sometimes described as being along socialist-realist lines, undertaken long after Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union. Both versions are uneven: in each the rather pithy third movement seems at a tangent from the rest of it, and you could argue that neither has the dramatic clout of the original ballet.
Noseda opted for the 1947 score in a performance that combined rigour with intensity. Played with superb precision, the hard-edged outer movements were relentless in their mechanistic ferocity. Poised woodwind solos ushered in the lyrical slow movement, derived from the ballet’s final scene, and building to an opulent climax, its rather forced grandiosity Prokofiev’s responsibility, not Noseda’s. That tricky third movement was all suave strings and sinewy elegance, but still seemed oddly insubstantial. I remain unconvinced by it as a symphony, though it was hard to imagine a better case for it than this.
After the interval, meanwhile, came a deeply felt performance of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with Simon Trpčeski as soloist. He brought plenty of weight, insight and drama to the organically unfolding opening movement and the turbulent scherzo, yet it was the delicacy of his playing elsewhere that will linger most in the memory – the sense of quiet stillness at the centre of the slow movement, for instance, or the grace of the finale, with its understated elegance and wit. Noseda proved a fine Brahmsian, too, superb in his judgment of the balance between formal logic and emotion.
• Recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 13 February.
