What would Tanner say?

On the train home from the Royal Festival Hall I learned of the death of Michael Tanner, who wrote this column from 1996 to 2014 and beyond. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment had been playing Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, and it’s not strictly true to say that the news made me wonder about his likely reaction to their performance, had he been able to hear it. But that’s only because, for anyone who came of age reading his criticism, asking ‘What would Michael say?’ is already a reflex – and will be for as long as we think or write about music.

There was plenty to interrogate here, not least that an orchestra founded to give historically informed performances of music from (the clue’s in the name) the 18th century was playing a symphony completed after the first world war. It’s not a wholly new development. Some British period instrument groups have tiptoed up to 1914 and then, as a rule, retreated. Certainly, none have embraced late romantic repertoire as vigorously or successfully as François-Xavier Roth’s extraordinary French ensemble Les Siècles, which plays Stravinsky ballets and Ravel operas on period instruments, to ravishing effect.

Could the fascination of hearing the textures of this symphony clarified and softened like this – the surprise at hearing timpani rattle rather than rumble; the way Sibelius’s cross-hatch string writing becomes a charcoal sketch rather than a linocut – outweigh reservations about Maxim Emelyanychev’s volatile conducting? Emelyanychev has made the transition from hot young prospect to much-loved fixture almost imperceptibly. The players grinned as he bounced
them through the opening movement of Grieg’s first Peer Gynt suite (yes – that serene, once-famous ‘Morning Mood’) at a lilting dance tempo.