According to its music director Riccardo Chailly, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig has the music of Johannes Brahms “flowing through its veins”. Chailly’s job is to make sure those veins don’t become sclerotic. This, the last of four concerts in a complete cycle of Brahms’s symphonies, showed just how well he has succeeded.
Brahms’s Violin Concerto demands a soloist of surpassing virtuosity. Step forward Leonidas Kavakos, who played like a man possessed, stretching some phrases almost to breaking point, investing them with an urgency that, without sounding rushed, verged on the manic: the first-movement cadenza was hair-raising. Chailly maintained deep clarity throughout the orchestra, refining passages that can too often seem congested. Yet in the closing movement he allowed the woodwinds to join Kavakos at the edge of delirium, to exhilarating effect.
There was equal freshness in the gently lopsided dance that opened Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. In the second movement, 60-odd strings playing pizzicato had a quality of weightlessness that barely ruffled the air. Chailly has a special gift for resolving apparent opposites: control and spontaneity, ruggedness and refinement.
