A Schubert/Bruckner symphony cycle under Lorin Maazel was to have been one of the big events of the London concert season until an over-busy diary forced Maazel to cancel. Given the bulk of the symphonies involved, this must have blown quite a hole in the London Symphony Orchestra's centenary season. Although he is now in his mid-70s Maazel is not short of a challenge or two. In 2002 he was propelled (somewhat unexpectedly) into the position of music director of the New York Philharmonic, a mere 60 years after he had first conducted it; and there is a pressing deadline in his diary for May, when the Royal Opera will give the premiere of his opera 1984, based on the book by George Orwell. Maybe the sight of his 70-something American colleague André Previn turning out full-scale operas has roused Maazel the composer into action.
As a result, all that was left of the Schubert/ Bruckner cycle was one concert featuring Bruckner's Eighth Symphony and this gala on Wednesday in aid of the London Symphony Orchestra, for which Maazel generously donated his fee.
The crowd-pleasing programme featured Mendelssohn and Dvor{u}ák, neither of them a Maazel speciality. The clarity of detail that he always gets is useful in Mendelssohn's busy music, but there is a didactic quality about Maazel's conducting that slams the door shut on early Romantic charm. The Hebrides Overture soon settled into a pattern of insistent, attacking rhythms - not so much the lap of waters around the Scottish coastline as the forces of Braveheart on the warpath.
Maazel's iron grip was also much in evidence in an unsmiling performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. In the circumstances it was perhaps understandable that the soloist, Lisa Batiashvili, should knuckle down to the task with determination, rather than the kind of easeful lyricism that might make the sun shine out of the concerto, as Joshua Bell and even Viktoria Mullova have recently.
The main work was Dvor{u}ák's Symphony No 9, "From the New World", here a showpiece plain and simple. Maazel undeniably knows how to whip up a climax and the aggressive sound of this performance took us back to the brash playing of the bad old LSO days: never mind the quality, hear the decibels. Come to think of it, the cancellation of all that Schubert and Bruckner was a close escape. Tel 0845 120 7550
