RNS/Kim live at the Glasshouse review – music fizzing with tension

Playing to a half-capacity Glasshouse, Sunwook Kim’s admirable account of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto was technically dazzling if lacking in nuance before the RNS found lift off with an invigorating Schumann symphony.

The receptionist at the box office of Gateshead’s newly renamed Glasshouse seemed puzzled when I arrived shortly before a concert on this frigid late November night. The concession ticket I was after wasn’t in her pile, and she looked worried before exclaiming “ah, under 30!” before apologetically asking for my ID. Looking around, it seemed perfectly possible that I was the only concertgoer this staff member had encountered that was eligible for the Glasshouse’s generous under-30s discount. It’s a fabulous, futuristic, indulgent venue and easily the finest concert hall in Tyne & Wear; schemes like these should in theory attract more youngsters, but their effects are yet to be felt.

Tonight, there doesn’t seem to many over 30, either. Perhaps there was an iota of disappointment detectable in pianist Sunwook Kim’s eyes as he took his initial bows to a half-empty seated section and muted applause. What’s more, something in the way he threw his hands down by his sides at one point during the opening exchanges of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 worryingly suggested tiredness. This was only the second night of a two night tour, but Kim has an excuse – this concerto is a unique symphonic undertaking. Running at around 50 minutes, the work is the Hamlet of classical music and ranks amongst the longest and most complex piano concertos in history, demanding big, flexible hands and serious stamina. Brahms famously insisted on calling it “a tiny, tiny concerto”, perhaps to downplay its significance as successor of his disastrously received First Piano Concerto and the 22 year long build-up for its follow-up. In fact, nothing about this work is tiny. Instead, it is often viciously loud and fast and even includes an extra, fourth movement in a break from the three-movement concerto tradition. It seemed to take a few minutes for Sunwook Kim to fully settle himself into the first movement (no bother, since that movement alone is nearly 20 minutes long), but the time we reached the staccato pounding at the piece’s heart both Kim and the audience seemed enthralled.

Pieces as bold as this one call for some showmanship from the pianist – an irate shake of the head, a flick of the hands skyward with every sharp chord – which Kim delivered on, but there was also plenty of humility on show too. He was more than happy to stoop to some thoughtful call and response with the orchestra, his phrasing meticulously matched with the strings’. Dinis Sousa was on vivacious form, barely visible from behind the piano save for his restless, often airborne feet. He proved an expert navigator of the third movement’s meanders in which the piano concerto briefly becomes a cello concerto, and Kate Gould’s lyrical cello solo came across strikingly heartfelt and human. Here too, for an all too brief moment, Kim found some calm in the eye of the storm, patiently teasing out a quiet melody as if beckoning a kitten into his arms.

The second movement sees the concerto at its fiercest and most expansive, although Brahms was nonetheless at pains to call it a “tiny wisp of a scherzo”. It was here where Kim’s playing showed a few blemishes. The wistful melody struggled under a heavy-handed treatment, played with a blunt-force violence particularly in the upper registers; there’s a thin line between a rich, full-sounding forte and reckless jabbing at the keys. Meanwhile, the movement’s quieter passages, including a few enchanting moments of solo piano, were demoted to pretty interstitials between the ‘real’ action, Kim apparently not seeing their relevance in the grand scheme of this epic concerto.

After Kim’s otherwise impressive Brahms, the second half of this concert was something of a curiosity. This was especially true for a rendition of chamber piece Elongation of Nights, written by Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė in 2009. It’s an intensely Baltic piece, almost to a fault. Dissonant, icy strings swelled and fell away in an intriguingly ambient ten minutes that might have set the mind wandering to tomorrow’s breakfast or my route home had it lasted much longer. Nonetheless, it was an effective conveyance of the long and lonely winter nights that envelop northern Europe every year – like a spooky, skeletal Baltic forest, Dinis Sousa remarked beforehand – if little else. Most impressive in the RNS’s performance was the extreme quietness that bookended the piece, Sousa letting a slender sheen of strings melt into silence like frost at dawn.

Robert Schumann’s exciting Fourth Symphony, a relatively compact work at 29 minutes, closed the concert. It’s a restless work – no theme or motif sticks around for long, and moments of respite from the torrent of notes are few and far between – but this seemed to suit the RNS, not least Sousa, who seemed in his element firing off an exciting new entry from a section of his orchestra virtually every bar. The RNS gained momentum alongside Schumann’s magnificently detailed score and were light on their feet for the electrifying scherzo as well as the blistering final presto, which had the strings operating at peak velocity.

I made sure to say goodbye to the couple sat next to me before leaving, who had asked me what I’d thought of Kim’s Brahms during the interval. I’d tried to talk intelligently about the piece but felt like I was unconvincingly rolling out all the fail-safe lines to get by in a conversation with an avid football fan; “Brahms was also overshadowed by Beethoven, wasn’t he?” was a bit like “Arsenal always try to walk it in, don’t they?”. Still, he seemed to believe I knew more than I truthfully do about classical music and appeared somewhat confused by my attendance, alone and conspicuously young-looking amongst the best seats in the house. It was understandable. Despite the Glasshouse’s £5 scheme for under-30s, people my age are sadly still an oddity in these sorts of venues. I left them with a promise I’d be back soon – perhaps Isata Kanneh-Mason doing Eroica in February. After Kim’s brilliant rendition of Brahms it wasn’t clear why more aren’t hooked on the genre. For me, visiting the Glasshouse for a pleasant evening is a no-brainer. Concerts of this calibre are simply too good to miss.

Enjoyed this post? Click here to support Undertone.