Classical review: Dresden Staatskapelle

Published on Wednesday 17 June 2009 19:38

*** GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

WHILE most British orchestras are lucky to have celebrated their centenaries, the Dresden Staatskapelle is now more than 460 years old. Conductors have ranged from Heinrich Schtz to Richard Wagner and, more recently, Bernard Haitink. Listening to them in Glasgow this week, you felt you were in the presence of history.

It's something to do with the oneness of the sound. The string body, packed closely together, moves with the single-minded precision of an ocean wave; the brass and wind, while retaining that distinctive east European independence of tone, produced sound that magically combined individual character with unanimity of purpose.

The programme itself had unified intention, centring wholly – apart from the Weber encore – on the music of Schumann. The young British conductor Daniel Harding directed with highly gestural consistency that fed through emotive and detailed performances of the overture Genoveva, the Second Symphony and the lesser-known Violin Concerto.

The last of these benefited from the deep-grained richness of soloist Renaud Capuon's tone. He plays a violin once owned by Isaac Stern, and it shows. This is not a wonderful piece, which partly explains why it lay unperformed until unearthed in the 1930s, and not even Capuon's firm hand could inspire a finale that effectively peters out.

Not so the symphony, which glowed with expressive detail. Harding has an operatic streak in him which dominated his animated reading of the work. Polish and passion inspired almost every part of this programme, restrained, though, by a modicum of time-honoured taste.