Prague Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, Birmingham, Friday 07 February 2025, 5☆☆☆☆☆. Review: David Gray & Paul Gray.

“Excellent playing from the Prague ensemble.”

You cannot go wrong opening a concert with Smetana’s vivacious, Bartered Bride Overture, certainly not if you play it this well. It is an undeniable showcase for the orchestra and full of folksy charm: scurrying string passagework at the start was delivered with clarity and definition. With equal clarity, the wind section gave us lots of character. Commanding brass completed the picture with some very clean playing from the horns. This set the bar high for the remainder of the evening.

Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is noted for the technical demands it makes of the soloist. Gabriel Montero proved herself more than equal to the task. It is a work that alternates spikey, intricately virtuosic passages with highly chromatic neo-romantic sections. Montero managed the virtuosic parts with a seemingly superhuman ease, while the romantic elements were imbued with an almost voluptuous lushness.

Conductor, Petr Altrichter - a mercurial presence on the podium - kept the energy levels high and smoothed over the changes of gear to create a real feeling of continual movement and development. The result was a totally integrated and compelling reading.

Montero, as is her wont, improvised an encore from melodic material suggested by the audience. In this case Frère Jacques was given a tempestuous, romantic treatment which almost certainly would have awakened the dozing “Brother” from his slumber.

Listening to a tone poem can sometime feel like reading runes. The composer scatters his signifiers and somehow one has to make sense of them. Dvořák’s The Noonday Witch tells a chilling supernatural story……apparently. A charming rustic opening is cut across by a baleful rhythmic motif from the oboe which translates into an ascending melodic figure….the Witch perhaps? Who knows. Eventually one has to give up trying to work out what it all meant and just enjoy the excellence of the playing, and of Dvořák’s seemingly endless capacity for harmonic invention.

More Dvořák in the final item; his brooding, dramatic Symphony No. 7. This was a powerful, committed performance, characterised in the opening and closing movements by a dynamic muscularity and a keen sense of the work’s architecture. Altrichter gave the Scherzo plenty of light and shade and invested it with a lilting, almost whimsical quality.

A high-quality evening of music-making, and it is hoped that this superb orchestra proves itself no stranger to Symphony Hall in Birmingham.

Conductor – Petr Altrichter

Piano – Gabriela Montero