LSO/ Wang/ Peltokoski review – Yuja Wang’s ferocious Rautavaara meets Peltokoski’s passionate Wagner

The pianist was electrifying in Rautavaara’s first concerto, while the young Finn conducted a condensed Ring with clever, slow-burn pacing

Mess with Yuja Wang at your peril. For anyone still in doubt of her temperament after last week, here she was, exploding into the solo part of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 1969 Piano Concerto No 1. It’s a monumental work demanding considerable physicality – at several points the soloist all but attacked the keyboard, slapping the keys in clusters or using a forearm to thump out the shape of the melody. Wang was formidable, Rautavaara’s dense writing providing an ideal showcase for her bright clarity. And the orchestra was just adversarial enough, thanks to the judgment of Tarmo Peltokoski, the Finnish conductor making his LSO debut.

Wang gave us three encores, starting with a richly singing Barcarolle by the Finnish composer Erkki Melartin and finishing with Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No 6, a duet for which she was joined by Peltokoski, no mean pianist himself. In between came the highlight: her own arrangement of the desperate second movement of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 8, dispatched with exhilarating virtuosity.

Still only 25, Peltokoski has packed a surprising amount of opera-house Wagner into his career so far; in the concert hall he has also been championing The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure, an arrangement by Henk de Vlieger condensing the 16-hour cycle into a little over 60 minutes. You could argue that a version like this, however skilfully done, is a bit of a Jive Bunny sequence geared towards those who already know and love The Ring. You could also grumble that it leaves out some of the best bits: Die Walküre gets relatively short shrift. But it was rewarding here, partly due to the orchestra being on glowing form and partly thanks to Peltokoski’s pacing.

He was initially a discreet presence on the podium, his beat small and almost impassive as the Rheingold music burst into sunlight around him; even in the Ride of the Valkyries he was mostly just holding back the brass. But this was a judicious husbanding of resources, because by the time it came to the triumphant Brünnhilde-Siegfried love music his gestures were broad and passionate, drawing out richly lyrical playing, and at the climax of Siegfried’s funeral music, both feet left the floor.