Having thoroughly colonised the 18th and early 19th centuries, the period-instrument movement is now making inroads into late Romanticism and early modernism. François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles have led the way with their exploration of the turn of the 20th century French repertoire, and here was the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, applying their historical expertise to Slavonic and Nordic music of the same period.
Where orchestras such as Les Siècles meticulously list the historical provenance of the instruments they use in every concert, the OAE has never offered such information, inviting the suspicion that in their mixed programmes one size might fit all. Here, for instance, it seemed as though the same woodwind and brass instruments were being used for the overture to Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila, which began the concert, as for Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony which ended it, yet the two works were premiered more than 70 years apart, in a period when the design of woodwind in particular was evolving rapidly, and taking different paths in different parts of Europe. Surely the point of period performance is not just to conjure up a vague aura of authenticity, but to get as close as possible to the sound world a composer imagined for his music, and in the early modern period, that requires much more historical precision.
But on its own, slightly compromised terms, the OAE concert was rewarding enough. Emelyanychev had jump-started it with an electrifying performance of the Glinka overture, immediately testing out the agility of the OAE strings, before giving the orchestra’s wind sections their chance to shine, or rather glint darkly, in Rachmaninov’s early tone poem, The Rock. If the first suite from Grieg’s Peer Gynt music was more routine, the quieter passages showed off the velvety warmth of the gut strings, a quality that Emelyanychev underlined at the end of the concert in an encore of more Grieg, one of the Op 34 Elegiac Melodies.
The Sibelius symphony had its powerful moments, too, whether every textural detail was precise or not. The first movement had all the requisite grandeur, with the OAE horns to the fore, the magical transformation into a scherzo adroitly managed, but the performance seemed to lose some of its momentum afterwards. The significant pause that Emelyanychev made before launching the finale did not help. Many conductors allow no gap at all after the slow movement, so that the whole symphony becomes a single organic entity; here that sense was lost and the work seemed diminished as a result.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are at The Anvil, Basingstoke, on 5 April.
