Concert
Malta Philarharmonic Orchestra
MCC

This was a very well-attended concert of light classical music but one nonetheless prepared with attention to detail and the usual fine direction of Michael Laus at the helm of an MPO in generally very fine fettle.

The evening opened with the sinfonia to Verdi’s Nabucco, one of his best such orchestral forays and which had a lot of punch, quoting some of the opera’s best known themes. There were some strange echoes coming across from the stage which at a later stage had either disappeared completely or it was my ears which had grown accustomed to them, or even managed to ignore completely. This was followed by a five-movement suite from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. The longish overture was a briskly crisp affair in which all the orchestral elements were finely balanced. I was not very happy with some lack of polish in the horns, both in the Bourrée and parts of La Paix (largo alla siciliana). One must say that this was resolved before the latter movement was over and the horns blended well with the rest of the brass to give a pleasant rendering of the fourth movement, La Réjouissance and the elegantly shaped concluding Minuet.

When it came to the famous Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, there was no doubt, and that even in retrospect once the concert was over, that this was a supremely beautiful reading and one of the evening’s best among the best.

In this class one could also put the sparkling overture to Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, with its token acknowledgement to what late 18th century composers (such as Haydn and even Beethoven in his later overture to Die Ruinen von Athen) perceived to be the idea of a “Turkish” sound. It was a really straight-forward, matter-of-fact and well-controlled yet easily flowing reading which delighted the audience no end. It was a good choice as one hardly ever hears any of Mozart’s operatic overtures apart from those of the da Ponte trilogy.

Completely different in style and taste was Copland’s El Salón Mexico, with the MPO projecting the more modern sound, exotic colour and dynamically rich and very rhythmic score replete with “latino” effects. Concluding, the MPO performed the suite from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. This is always a popular choice and if to some rather hackneyed, this reading was not, as its performance was a great source of pleasure, it projected all the magic of the story line and the orchestra was up to the richly orchestrated score.

The mood at the end was very much for an encore and Mro Laus and the MPO offered the popular Radetzky March by Johann Strauss I, complete with the expected audience participation.