London audiences can look forward to getting to know Jakub Hrůša a lot better in the coming years. On a night off from conducting Janáček’s opera Jenůfa at Covent Garden – where he is music director designate – he put his stamp on a BBCSO programme beginning with the little-known and rewarding scherzo triste by his compatriot Pavel Haas, a composer who would be much better known had he lived longer: he was murdered in Auschwitz aged 45. Inspired by an unhappy love affair, the scherzo is angular and restless initially, its fragmentary theme coalescing into a longer melody and finally finding calm in a lyrical culmination, recalling Janáček at his most radiant.
In Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 2 the soloist Jonathan Biss was an energising presence from his first entry. The lonely lines at the end of the slow movement, played with the sustaining pedal down, sounded almost other-worldly; elsewhere, his buoyant phrases bounced off the warm-toned orchestra with transparent clarity. But in his encore, Schubert’s G-Flat Major Impromptu, the tune was so soft that it merged into the rippling accompaniment, dimming the melody’s song-like nature – if it’s possible for this piece to sound too introspective, that might be what he achieved.
The playing Hrůša drew from the orchestra in Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony was on another scale entirely. Subtitled The Year 1905, the symphony memorialises a Russian Bloody Sunday – a massacre of peaceful protesters by the Tsar’s soldiers in St Petersburg – and in this performance that meant some of the loudest orchestral music the Barbican’s walls can ever have contained. Several times the orchestra hit full tilt, including a barrage of percussion with harsh xylophone on top and, in the final bars, the bells sounding the alarm. And yet in Hrůša’s performance this way wasn’t just an effect; it was the endgame of a considered, slow-burn interpretation that highlighted the mournful revolutionary songs that Shostakovich wove into the music. The flutes in the first movement and the long viola melody in the third were the most haunting, but many others were, fleetingly, just as effective – so it was not just the symphony’s juggernaut power that was striking, but its soulfulness too.
• Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 4 February, and on BBC Sounds for 30 days.
