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

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’.

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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.