IT has been said that an RSNO Classic Bites concert represents "an easy night out for a critic". Not really. The music is three times removed from its context: it's an extract, hauled out of the piece of which it forms just a part; further, it is removed from any context the complete piece might have in the full concert programme to which it will eventually belong. And further still, it is by no means the case that the conductor of the "bite" is the same conductor who will be in charge when the full programme comes around.
So don't draw too many conclusions, I would suggest. None the less, there were a few interesting points which arose from Saturday night's Classic Bites, mostly conducted by music director Stephane Deneve, the first of four such concerts in the new RSNO season.
Deneve's penchant for long, flowing legato lines, almost as though they are being sung, characterised numerous of his extracts, especially the Montagues and Capulets theme from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, the second movement of Beethoven Seven (very poised) and, most of all, the finale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, where the second theme, usually punched out by the woodwind, was almost mellifluous in its profile.
These features apart, the real interest lay in the debut of RSNO's new assistant conductor, David Danzmayr, who demonstrated, in Lara's theme from Dr Zhivago and, outstandingly in the growing opulence of the second section of Also Sprach Zarathustra (not usually heard as an extract), an intriguing potential command of the big Romantic musical canvas. Danzmayr will take the remaining three Classic Bites concerts himself. We will come to know this personable young Austrian.
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