Stirring and sophisticated: RLPO, Chooi, Hindoyan, at the Philharmonic Hall, reviewed

Daniel Barenboim was supposed to perform with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this month. His recent health concerns made that impossible, but it was a reminder that for the first time since the appointment of the late Libor Pesek in 1987, the RLPO is under the direction of a conductor soaked in the German tradition. Domingo Hindoyan, the orchestra’s chief conductor since autumn 2021, was born in Venezuela and has a soft spot for French music, but Barenboim is his mentor and there’s a gravity – an intellectual centre – to his conducting that made me eager to hear him get to grips with the sacred monsters of German romanticism.

It’s something of an RLPO tradition, after all. Max Bruch – whose Scottish Fantasy opened Hindoyan’s programme – moved to Liverpool in 1880 as the orchestra’s chief conductor, taking a yellow-brick semi near Sefton Park and inviting the likes of Joseph Joachim to Merseyside. Bruch and Joachim actually premièred the Scottish Fantasy in Liverpool, presumably (the original Philharmonic Hall burned down in 1933, but the current hall occupies its footprint) on more or less the precise spot where the violinist Timothy Chooi stood for this performance: feet apart, head bowed over his instrument, bobbing, swaying and occasionally sidling over towards Hindoyan or the harpist Elizabeth McNulty, who was sitting up front by the second fiddles.

If there was the occasional Highland squall in Chooi’s high passage-work, it was offset by acres of rich, peaty low G- and D-string sonority: sultry, smoky, and smoothed along by tasteful (but unembarrassed) portamenti. The Scottish Fantasy isn’t as popular as it once was; in death, as in life, Bruch has never really shaken his reputation as Brahms’s Mini-Me, and his First Violin Concerto has fallen from the Classic FM Top Ten without winning its composer his rightful place alongside Cilla Black, Sonia and the Fab Four on Liverpool’s Mathew Street Wall of Fame.