Review: Season Opening Concert at Philharmonic Hall *****

Does the world speed up as you get older? Tempus has certainly fugit since Domingo Hindoyan first arrived at Hope Street – and remarkably conductor and orchestra are now embarking on their third year of playing together.

It’s an anniversary that was announced in audacious style with this concert of work from across the pond and which set a lofty bar for the season to come.

Both the Phil and the softly stellar Scouse superstar Paul Lewis were on electrifying form in a programme packed with thrilling music making, evocative tunes and lively rhythms.

Lewis, renowned for his exploration of the work of Beethoven and Schubert, spent some of the Covid pandemic adding to his wider repertoire – including Aaron Copland’s little-performed jazz era Piano Concerto.

So at least one good thing came out of lockdown.

Opening with a bright orchestral fanfare but developing into something much more complex and intriguing, this two-movement piece is so absolutely of its time (1926) and place (New York) that you can almost taste the speakeasy gin rickey.

Lewis, svelte in black and with his salt and pepper curls bobbing, luxuriated in a piano part that developed from warmly discordant to metronomic pulsing to melody threaded through a blizzard of cleverly crazy dissonance, while the Phil provided deliciously angular accompaniment.

Brilliant stuff.

The 20s double bill continued with a pacy performance of Gershwin’s crowd-pleasing Rhapsody in Blue, Lewis shaping its intricate motifs and melodies with a lovely fluidity and lightness of touch while the orchestra evidently revelled in its role as a giant jazz band.

It was a busy night for an augmented percussion section, while clarinettist Miquel Ramos delivered the rhapsody’s opening glissando with impressive panache.

Copland was cannily paired here not only with Gershwin’s evergreen favourite but also with Bernstein’s joyous Symphonic Dances, a distillation of some of the hits from his West Side Story soundtrack into an orchestral piece and which opened the concert.

Bernstein was a big fan – and champion – of Copland, and you can hear echoes of the older composer’s youthful chutzpah in Bernstein’s own work.

Under Hindoyan’s baton it was energetic and swaggering, gamely punctuated with finger clicks and shouts of ‘Mambo’ from the band, and with glossy brass but also real tenderness in the Somewhere section and the adagio finale (I Have a Love).

There were more Symphonic Dances after the interval, this time from Rachmaninov’s American residence, with some great work from the wind section – including a lovely alto sax solo – and plenty of colour throughout the orchestra as it swirled towards the work’s Red Shoes-style finale.