Concert review: Ava Bahari (violin) Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra/Santtu-Matias Rouvali

Whether the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO) is, as some say, Sweden’s best orchestra, Malmö Live is certainly the nation’s best concert hall, acoustically speaking. A rare chance to hear the former playing in the latter came along in September, the GSO opening its visit with Max Savikangas’s War or Peace, premiered a day earlier in Gothenburg. The beguilingly orchestrated score’s cyclic rhythmic patterns led nicely into the evening’s concerto.

That was Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, played by Gothenburg-born Ava Bahari, a notable emerging talent. She never tried to make Stravinsky’s concerto something it is not, offering taste and containment in the opening ‘Toccata’ but with an occasionally sultry tone to her playing and no fear of the stretched chord that opens each movement. Her 1829 Pressenda instrument doesn’t make the biggest of sounds, but she marshals it with plenty of character, as for instance in the gritty corners of ‘Aria 1’, while her ability to vary her dynamics through a single phrase in ‘Aria 2’ was notable. The finale had impish charm and crystalised Bahari’s concerto grosso-like view of the piece, including a stylish duet with the GSO’s concertmaster Sara Trobäck.

It was followed after the interval by a climactic performance of Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite characterised by conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s extreme shaping of string phrase endings. A special mention for the GSO’s principal cellist Clæs Gunnarsson, whose solos in ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ were a delicacy.

ANDREW MELLOR