It’s no longer a given that European tours by North American orchestras will include the UK, which is one more reason to welcome this visit from the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and its Venezuelan music director Rafael Payare. The evening started with Jeder Baum spricht, a short 2020 piece by the Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi channelling anger at climate change in punchy, motoring strings, and evoking teeming nature in smoother music underpinned by burbling woodwinds. Inspired by Beethoven, it nonetheless felt slender next to the real thing which followed: the Piano Concerto No. 1. In the opening bars Payare drew out a gorgeously soft string sound, to which the soloist Javier Perianes responded with playing that was unfussy, almost nonchalant. Yet there was also the suspicion that he and Payare shared a certain impatience – nothing was allowed to linger, and in the fastest passages the music occasionally seemed about to trip over itself. It was an appealingly sunny performance, but it was good also to have Perianes’ encore, Grieg’s Notturno, as a reminder that he can also create stillness and spaciousness.
That silky string sound returned as the motto theme of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique got under way – the lift-off point for a performance that had plenty of colour and pace without quite sustaining its peaks of dramatic intensity. Conducting from memory, Payare was untroubled by the need to share the podium with a music stand and free to use every inch of the space – which he did enthusiastically, almost balletically, at times crouching so low as to be sharing the eye level of the players below him. For the waltzing second movement the lead trumpeter moved to sit with the harps, an unusual bit of positioning that brought out the way their busy lines interact and lent a sequinned shininess to the overall sound. The last movement, with the bells tolling somewhere behind the stage, bass drum thudding and the brass in sonorous chorale, had a deliciously twisted churchiness. More Berlioz – the Marche Hongroise from La Damnation de Faust – made for a straighter yet snappy encore.