JUST 54 years old, but weathered, cramped and acoustically impaired: surely there won’t be many who will miss the old Royal Festival Hall after it closes on Sunday. After all, we have been promised a bright new interior, comfier seats and, most importantly, a friendlier acoustic when the building reopens in 2007 after its £91 million refurbishment.
No tears, then, at the final orchestral concert to be held in this 1951 relic? Well, maybe not at first. Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto is a classic tearjerker, but it has become a victim of its own success, its emotive climaxes and lush orchestration often overmilked by indulgent interpreters.
As a peerless pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy once avoided such traps with the piece; here, conducting it, he occasionally fell into them — and his partnership with the French pianist Hélène Grimaud often sounded more like a confrontation than a meeting of minds. The orchestral playing was rarely less than assured, but too much bombast smudged the work’s poignancy. Grimaud is an intense performer but, given little room for manoeuvre by Ashkenazy, her emotional range seemed limited and the heavy-handedness of her approach bordered on the mannered.
Ashkenazy was on firmer ground in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, not least because this was his own orchestration of the work rather than the Ravel confection that is usually played. Sparser, more austere and ultimately more Russian-sounding in Ashkenazy’s version, these vignettes were teasingly vivid — right up to the grand, emotive climax of The Great Gate of Kiev.
Where to go from there? To a goodbye encore, naturally, with the inclusion of Haydn’s Farewell symphony — or at least its final movement, where the players are required gradually to leave the platform during the closing bars, leaving only a pair of violinists to say farewell to the symphony — and to the concert hall. But outside in the foyer the finale continued and a minor miracle unfolded. For years Ashkenazy has strictly limited his appearances at the piano, but now he joined a rejuvenated Grimaud for two affectionate duets by Fauré and Schumann in an impromptu post-concert party.
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Watching 3,000 rapt audience members squeezed into the RFH to hear them — including some very lucky onlookers who simply happened to be there — it suddenly seemed more difficult to say goodbye.