Kopatchinskaja/Stenz/LPO, Royal Festival Hall, review: Soloist excels in Larcher's extraordinary violin concerto

Larcher leaped on stage to join the ovation for Kopatchinskaja after a fiery, original performance

Kopatchinskaja dominated the second movement (Marco Borggreve)

Some musicians are compelling by their presence alone, and so it was when Patricia Kopatchinskaja, diminutive in a flame-coloured ball-dress, took the stage as soloist in Thomas Larcher’s Violin Concerto. Daughter of a violinist and a cimbalom-player, and imbued with the sounds and rhythms of her native Moldova, she brings a fiery originality to everything she plays.

Larcher’s concerto requires a harp plus celesta, an accordion, six thumb-pianos, cowbells, a water-gong, a whip, and a frying pan, and its textures are influenced by Romanian folk music. Its first movement is all about symmetrical poise and its destruction; its second reflects what Larcher describes as ‘a hole being torn in the earth’s crust, into which everything disappears’.

Kopatchinskaja is imbued with the sounds of her native Moldova (Marco Borggreve)

The web of sound with which the work began was so delicate that one was hard pressed to know how it was generated: crotales, a cowbell, and a murmuring bassoon all highlighted the purity of the violin. Then things turned muddy as the soloist violently elbowed everyone aside in a sudden anarchic impulse, before regaining the original poise.

Kopatchinskaja dominated the second movement with everything from broad, double-stopped melodies to stratospheric yelps and glissandi: when Larcher leaped on stage to join the ovation for his soloist, the London Philharmonic, and conductor Markus Stenz, one remembered that his hobby is extreme rock-climbing: this work dealt in just that sort of danger.