SYDNEY SYMPHONY

RACHMANINOV was born in Russia and died in Beverly Hills in 1943, and for several generations his music stubbornly remained there. You could take the symphonies out of Hollywood, reasoned some critics, but you couldn't take the Hollywood out of the symphonies.

This is not quite fair, for the slow movement of his Second Symphony, bowdlerised for the popular song Never Gonna Fall in Love Again, was only written in 1907. By classical and modern standards, it sprawls and repeats too much and it is true that with some performances one feels it strokes the pleasure centre with its hook-like melodies a bit too often, leading to a post-sugar let-down.

But it is extremely well scored, and when the whole orchestra listens, balances and is guided with the true sense of expressive pace and emphasis that Vladimir Ashkenazy provided, the effect, as with many great slow movements, is of an intensely concentrated suspension of time.

There is something about Ashkenazy's leadership that brings the best out of the Sydney Symphony: there is unforced, musical concentration, careful balance and a sense that everything is geared towards creating that sense of flow when movement is unfettered by rational intervention, and geared only to the needs of the expressive moment. The first and second movements were particularly fine in this regard, the scherzo moving effortlessly between flushed rhythmic energy and dolorous lassitude.

In the lesser-known Fourth Piano Concerto (much revised by Rachmaninov and played here in its last, 1941, version) the pianist Kazune Shimizu was a little disappointing in this regard, particularly after the sensuous lyrical performance by Cristina Ortiz of the Second Concerto last week. Shimizu played the finale with steely projection and power, but the sound tended to be hard and in the first movement there was insufficient attention to shaping the melodies and letting them grow.

The program started with The Rock, which used the musical imagery of Wagner and the sequence techniques of Liszt to create a highly pictorial evocation of cloud-capped rocks transformed by sunlight. Written in 1893, its best moments anticipated impressionist colours and demonstrated Rachmaninov's early orchestral mastery and the Sydney Symphony's capacity for refined textural delicacy.