There was a time when Dohnanyi’s Variations on a Nursery Song made frequent appearances on CBSO programmes, including several pre-war ones with the composer himself as piano soloist, Adrian Boult conducting. But since 1964 it has been a stranger, and a packed auditorium on Thursday afternoon couldn’t for the life of itself understand why.
This is a gem of a piece, once heard never forgotten. Throughout the variations the composer pays affectionate homage to so many near-contemporaries, Wagner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Franck and Reger among them, all the while giving every player in a huge orchestra so much to reward them, and putting demands on the soloist which require awesome technique as well as wit and warmth.
And Peter Donohoe has these in spades. His pianism coruscated with rippling chords and figuration, and encompassed both the innocent as he unfolded the trite little “Twinkle, twinkle little star” tune after Dohnanyi’s massively imposing orchestral build-up, and the joyously collaborative: the way he waited an age to resume after the solo bassoon’s outrageously prolonged paused note near the end was a comedy to behold.
The young Russian conductor Mikhail Tatarnikov kept a cool head during these charming shenanigans, and Donohoe embraced him generously at the end, as well as showing genuine tribute to the orchestra.
Tatarnikov had begun with a reading of Mussorgsky’s scary Night on the Bare Mountain which allowed all the CBSO’s virtuosity to tell; what superb utterances from the heavy brass.
Rachmaninov’s glorious Second Symphony, a work which the orchestra has under its skin so much that it could almost play it conductorless, fared less favourably. The trio of the Scherzo slowed down so much that it almost ground to a halt, the gorgeous melodies of the Adagio emerged as laboured rather than fluently lyrical, and, worst crime of all, Tatarnikov followed the disgraceful Russian tradition of making cuts in some of the most magnificent music that country has ever produced.
