John Wilson conducts The Academy Symphony Orchestra with immense youthfulness
John Wilson’s recent concert with the Royal Academy Symphony placed two works of early, searching boldness side by side: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with soloist Emanuil Ivanov. Both pieces require great energy that defines the two young writers in their earlier stages of their professional journeys.
In The Rite of Spring, Wilson’s reputation for clarity and structural focus was juxtaposed with the orchestra’s youthfulness. Pulses, layers, and unrefined vitality, the orchestra almost felt like a beast even Wilson required formidable stamina to tame. The sound felt raw in the best sense like a surging life force pressing outward, slightly rough at the edges, but entirely appropriate to the music’s theme of spring as something violent and primordial.
The second part, where the sacrifice is ready to be chosen, seeped into a darker psychological space. Wilson’s style feels less mystic and distant, but more quietly anxious and cautious from within. Such framing demonstrates sharp contrast against later tableaux like the Evocation of the Ancestors, Ritual Action of the Ancestors, and the Sacrificial Dance. When the percussion in these sections felt almost inevitable where the visceral physicality didn’t just strike the year, but instead swept over and enveloped your entire sensory field. You may even thank to the absence of the ballet because the mind- dance is more exciting and pulse-driven. Compared to many recordings (like the 2007 Karajan) are quite restrained (and of course, precise), this Rite of Spring felt exceptionally intense and life-affirming.
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which opened the program, offered another portrait of youthful assertion expressed by solo pianist Emanuil Ivanov. Sometimes, the orchestra and the piano sounded too locked into a single blend lacking necessary layers, so the piece’s architecture emerged more as unbound energy rather than as clearly-defined contour.
Ivanov’s approached the work with strong interpretive insight. He clearly understood the harmonic richness and rhythmic inventiveness at play. It would be all the more compelling if his clarity of tone and articulation could rise to meet up to the depth of his insight. Several cadenza passages felt blurred, and the colouristic shaping of tone somehow lacked definition, leaving the sound somewhat less luminous. Those quick flashes of lyricism, the places where early Rachmaninov briefly unfolds, didn’t quite resonate in the ear. But even lacking polish, Ivanov’s performance also held genuine, immediate liveliness similar to the performance of Rite of Spring, which should have been the spirit of the night.