LSO/Harding

It is often said that the great interpretations are those that make familiar music sound new. So it was with Bruch's First Violin Concerto, played by Renaud Capuçon and conducted by Daniel Harding at the last concert of the LSO's London season. One tends to think of Bruch's First as done to death – erroneously, since it surfaces in concert schedules less than one imagines – and also as being somehow delicate in a post-Mendelssohn, post-Schumann sort of way. Here it was done with a craggy masculinity that placed it closer in style and spirit to Brahms. Capuçon, compact and hunky, delivered it with great passion but not so much as a hint of sentimentality, launching the allegro moderato with a hauteur that matched his aloof, almost Byronic platform manner, and later tracing the great melodic arcs of the slow movement with a tragic nobility that was entirely new in this work. Harding, meanwhile, unleashed huge orchestral climaxes, very much in the grand manner yet utterly startling. This was Bruch with testosterone. Anyone who heard it won't, I suspect, forget it in a hurry. After the interval came Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, where we were on less sure ground. I've always liked Harding's Bruckner for its lack of self-conscious religiosity and its detached appraisal of the music's architecture. Here, however, it didn't quite work. Swifter speeds than usual reminded us that Bruckner has points in common with Brahms that are usually overlooked. But the Adagio performed coolly can turn ponderous. And in a performance that was otherwise scrupulously played, there were a couple of fluffs at the start of the whirling scherzo.