Last Thursday I went to the last of the Bath Phil’s ‘Summer Classics’ season at Bath Abbey. The programme had been changed (as with the last Bath Phil concert I went to) with Lutoslawski and Gorecki disappearing in favour of the rather less Polish Hebrides overture, played with considerable verve.
The main part of the concert was Chopin’s two piano concertos, played by Peter Donohoe. Some years ago a choir director claimed that Mr Donohoe borrowed and still had his best pair of cufflinks, but I was sat too far back to be able to tell whether he was wearing any. The performances were energetic and fluent, though at the back of the nave the detail of the orchestra came over rather better than that in the piano part. There is a problem with this programme for the orchestra, which is that they were playing almost nothing except Chopin, whose orchestral writing can’t be said to be very interesting. The conductor (Jason Thornton) did something with it by introducing a bit more rubato into the orchestral part than you usually get, also tweaking some dynamic markings such as the end of the first movement of the E minor concerto.
Hearing both concertos together confirmed my opinion (pretty generally shared) that the so-called first (in E minor) is considerably the better of the two. Though there are some good moments in the F minor concerto, particularly in the slow movement.
As an extra we were given the Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, in the original version with orchestra. Peter Donohoe remained sprightly to the end.
There is a review from the Bath Chronicle here.