Tag: Northern Lights and German Resonance

There was nothing Fawlty about the RLPO in last night’s performance—a real Touch of Class, you might say. In that BBC comedy classic, Sybil famously complained about her henpecked husband “listening to that racket”—prompting Basil’s comic rejoinder that it was Brahms’s Third racket. Perhaps she would have preferred his Fourth Symphony, one of the great Romantic masterpieces, brought vividly to life at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall by debutant Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska. The programme opened with little-known Swedish composer Ida Moberg’s evocation of dawn, traversed Sibelius’s elemental drama, and closed with Brahms at his most romantic and architecturally grandiose. All of it under the guidance of a left-handed baton—a rare sight, even in Liverpool, the city of famous left-hand...