SYDNEY — It’s not often you would describe a symphony orchestra concert as entertaining, but this is the adjective that came to mind for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra program Sept. 3-5 at the Sydney Opera House. Not because the program offered familiar, general-audience repertoire or a patronizing program, but the exact opposite.
The SSO has hit on a winning formula — one that is genuinely rejuvenating. Program two firecracker works, in this case Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos in D minor and Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Recruit two charismatic millennial piano virtuosos. Keep the entire program to an hour and dispense with the intermission. It’s an intergenerational winner: a bedtime-adjacent outing for families with young children, a pre-dinner cocktail for the under-30s, and entirely manageable for everyone else. No bells and whistles required, just a commitment to great music-making. Under conductor Stéphane Denève, the SSO had that in surfeit.
Lucas and Arthur Jussen — Dutch brothers, former child prodigies, Deutsche Grammophon artists since 2010, and frequent guests with orchestras of the caliber of the Berlin Philharmonic and their hometown Royal Concertgebouw — were the headline act. They brought their much-traveled Poulenc concerto, a work that makes particularly exacting demands on ensemble. With no cadenzas and few solo passages, the two pianos remain in near-continuous dialogue with each other and the orchestra, only sometimes unaccompanied. The Jussens acquitted the required synchronicity with panache. Their playing had the alertness and precision the piece asks.
Poulenc’s score is colorful. The listener’s attention shifts from Parisian music hall to Impressionistic, gamelan-inspired washes to a deliberate slow-movement homage to Mozart’s D minor Concerto, K. 466.
The opening movement, Allegro ma non troppo, offered particular effervescence. The duo favored a highly staccato, speedy approach — more presto than allegro — that immediately established the work’s mercurial character. The balance between piano and orchestra was generally well-judged, allowing the detail of Poulenc’s writing to register without sacrificing the work’s rhythmic momentum.
There were, however, a few passages in the third movement, Allegro molto, where enthusiasm threatened clarity. Some woolly articulation in the piano writing, compounded by orchestral weight, briefly obscured the thematic detail. It was a minor quibble in an otherwise jubilant account, and one that captured the work’s wit without trying to inflate its significance.
The audience responded accordingly, bringing the Jussens back for an encore: Igor Roma’s two-piano transcription of Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2.
The second work belonged entirely to the orchestra and Denève: Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Written in the 1920s, as European music was moving in increasingly modernistic directions, the piece looked in the opposite direction. Respighi’s language is unapologetically pictorial — childhood, death, night, and imperial glory, mapped onto four Roman pine groves moving from present day back to antiquity.
Respighi’s material looks retrospectively to Gregorian chant and folk melody, and the four-movements — played without pause — require a judicious reign of restraint and monitoring of momentum to ensure that the heroic blasts of the final catacomb-to-Appian-Way crescendo is not undermined. Denève’s performance was controlled, sometimes witty, and always legible in intent. The SSO was in fine form, with the work arriving as a collective achievement, unanimous in conviction.
The enthusiastic response to the program from the generation-spanning audience demonstrated that accessibility need not mean dilution. Perhaps that is the most useful lesson. An orchestra does not necessarily need bells and whistles to rejuvenate the concert experience. Sometimes it needs only good programming, exceptional musicians, and the confidence to know that playing music well is enough.
