Programming is a worrying issue. We need to include new works in concerts in order to refresh the repertoire, but audiences seem to shy away from unknown quantities -- and to be honest, many of them turn out to be duds which we'll never hear again.
You could have said as much about Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, the largest, most sprawling and most questing piano concerto ever to have been composed at the time of its 1809 premiere. But its inclusion in Thursday afternoon's CBSO concert packed a Symphony Hall (they even sold out of programmes) which had been audience-depleted the previous evening when a º£½ÇÊÓÆµ premiere was on offer.
Paul Lewis was the soloist, not without the odd slip during the performance, but drawing from his instrument such a wonderful range of colour and inflection, as well as being able to make the very highest notes of the keyboard "speak". His pianissimos were particularly arresting, and his collaboration with Andris Nelsons, who, batonless, occasionally conducted with just a flicking little finger, welded this far-reaching work into a seamless whole.
What struck me most about the subsequent performance of Richard Strauss' Symphonia Domestica was how much this Bavarian composer and Elgar shared a common language (as well as mutual admiration). So often in this account under Nelsons' empowering baton woodwind solos, and especially those from Laurence Jackson's violin, evoked the wistfulness which lies at the heart of so many of Elgar's scores, and counterbalanced the roistering Gemutlichkeit of this tone-poem's more self-aggrandising moments.