United Kingdom Bacewicz, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams: Liya Petrova (violin), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Adam Hickox (conductor). Cadogan Hall, London, 8.10.2026. (AV-E)
Grażyna Bacewicz – Overture (1943)
Sibelius – Violin Concerto in D minor, Op.47
Vaughan Williams – Symphony No.5 in D major
Sarah Bardwell, Managing Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, came onto the stage before the concert began to address the audience about the RPO Legacy initiative, which invites people to leave something of themselves to the RPO. She spoke of the lasting impact of gifts left in wills, and how such generosity can help sustain the orchestra and carry its music into future generations.
The RPO’s 1946 Club recognises those who make this enduring commitment, turning a private act of generosity into a public gift to musical life. It was a welcome reminder that an orchestra’s future depends not only on the brilliance of those world-class players, but also to ensure that the music continues to be made long after we are long departed. For what a better way to go, than giving a gift to the RPO?
The concert opened with Grażyna Bacewicz’s Overture, a work rarely heard but deserving of far more frequent outings. The opening had a Toscanini-like urgency, with sharply etched rhythms and uncompromising accents. The elegant and eloquent Adam Hickox launched the music with tautness and swagger, drawing incisive, impassioned playing from the RPO. There was an unmistakably Central European character to the sound: dark-grained strings, a weighty, resonant lower register and an earthy directness that recalled the distinctive sonority of the Czech Philharmonic.
Here, clearly, is a great conductor in the making. Bacewicz’s overzealous Overture flourished as a bracingly buoyant curtain-raiser with vivacious verve seductively sweeping the audience along.
In Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D minor, RPO Artist-in-Residence violinist Liya Petrova began the Allegro moderato against a soft, tremulous orchestral texture that established an eerie atmosphere of expectancy, as Hickox held back the full orchestral weight. Petrova’s entrance was searching and intense, her violin line emerging almost imperceptibly from the muted strings’ faint tremor, as though taking shape out of the orchestral haze. Her silvery tone had a stately simplicity, while her pliant phrasing carried a pensive purity, the long, searching line hovering over the shimmering strings before the prophetic clarinet briefly echoed it.
As the Allegro moderato unfolded, Petrova dispatched the rapid runs, double-stopping and intricate changes of register with dazzling assurance, never allowing virtuosity to become mere display. The resonantly sonorous double basses lending a particular weight to the orchestral texture and engaging with the solo violin in exchanges that gave the lower register a forceful, independent voice.
Ensuring soloist and orchestra met as equals, Hickox elicited an extraordinary duality of transparency and weight from the RPO — each architectural strand of the texture sounding clean and distinct, yet perfectly bound to the collective whole. Here, the orchestra itself stood as soloists among the soloist; for the orchestra rose up as individual virtuosic equals against the solitary violin.
The Adagio di molto opened with the clarinets and oboes sounding almost within reach, their short, unsettled phrases emerging with striking intimacy before Petrova entered with the broad, songlike theme. She played with extraordinary tranquillity, her silvery tone floating above the delicate pluck of the strings. Every exchange between the instruments came into sharp relief, while the double basses lent the texture a dark, resonant depth. The opening calm gave way to a darker, more urgent passage as the clarinets and oboes returned with greater force. Beneath them, the basses sustained a low pedal note while the timpani added a taut, insistent pulse. Petrova answered with agitated double-stopped phrases, her earlier tranquillity giving way to a more troubled turbulence.
The finale (Allegro, ma non tanto) brought a sudden surge of rhythmic energy. Petrova attacked the dance-like material with incisive articulation and athletic assurance, giving the movement a rough-edged, almost earthy character. The virtuosity was dazzling, but her playing retained a sense of humour and rhythmic spring; the movement never became a succession of technical hurdles.
For an encore, Petrova delighted us with a razor-sharp shard from Pirin by Dobrinka Tabakova, the award-winning Bulgarian-British composer. Composed in 1999 for solo viola and premiered the following year, Pirin has since appeared in versions for solo cello and full orchestra. Drawing on the techniques of the gadulka, a traditional Bulgarian bowed instrument, Pirin evokes the rugged, dramatic landscape of the Bulgarian mountains.
The mountain music erupted into a fierce, rustic energy as Petrova transformed the single violin into a vehement vehicle of pure kinetic force. The performance drove forward with the sharp, percussive bite of rapid bow strokes and resonant open strings that perfectly mimicked the traditional gadulka. Every syncopated rhythm and biting accent felt dangerously precise, evoking the jagged peaks and breathless dances of the Bulgarian mountains in a display of relentless, muscular virtuosity. By stripping away all orchestral padding, this ferocious fragment demanded total command from the performer, gripping the hall in a spell of spiked stillness until the final, fiery note spliced the silence.
The evening concluded with an ineffably irradiant, incandescent performance of Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No.5 in D major. It was the most deeply felt account of the work I have heard, and it established Adam Hickox as an excellent exponent of the composer.
The Preludio opened with a low C in the cellos and basses beneath the distant calls of the two horns. Hickox gave these opening phrases room to breathe before the violins unfolded their flowing, lyrical melody. His control of the score was masterly, keeping the shifting rhythms taut and the orchestral balance finely judged, so that inner voices remained clear without sacrificing the breadth of the sound. As the pace quickened, the strings darted through restless figures while woodwind and brass accents sharpened the movement’s drive. The opening horn calls returned, leading to a broad, powerful statement of the main melody before the orchestra subsided into the quieter closing phrases.
The Scherzo brought a sudden change of pace, with Hickox drawing crisp articulation and nimble rhythmic precision from the RPO. The strings moved with a light, springy energy, while the woodwind interjections gave the movement extra bite. Hickox kept the rapid exchanges clean and sharply defined, allowing the music’s restless momentum to build without ever becoming heavy or hurried.
In the Romanza, Hickox and the RPO unlocked a rare sanctuary of contemplation and compassion, completely uncovering the beating heart within Vaughan Williams’s long, meditative meanderings. Hickox clearly possesses an instinctive, generational understanding of this luminously idyllic soundworld; not just conducting the music, but living the music.
Under gifted guidance, the cor anglais sang with a raw, plaintive tenderness, its caressing phrases instantly answered and deepened by a luminous cushion of serene strings. Instead of merely managing the tempo, Hickox breathed with the transitions, pacing them with such intuitive care that the melodic lines floated effortlessly forward without a hint of haste. The collective restraint from the orchestra was spellbinding — a quiet, breathless intensity so perfectly sustained that when the final note vanished, the closing stillness hung in the air like a shared secular prayer.
The Passacaglia brought Vaughan Williams’s masterpiece to an incandescent culmination, guided entirely by Hickox’s assured, astute architectural grasp. Rather than simply layering the variations over the recurring bass theme, he let the movement sprout organically from its foundations, navigating each shift with an infallible sense of destiny and scale. The strings met his pacing with a colossal, dark-hued eloquence, anchoring the symphonic argument with absolute authority, while the brass cut through the soundscape with a surging, muscular power that never once compromised the intricate inner musical movements. Hickox possessed a total composure at the podium, unravelling the complex, shifting meters with crisp transparency and maintaining a perfect equilibrium as the music gathered a ferocious momentum towards its final, radiant benediction.
Ultimately, this evening belonged to the alluring and compelling Adam Hickox, proving to be a conductor of exceptional interpretive maturity as the young maestro commanded the podium with a suave, elegant baton technique that coaxed an exemplary performance out of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It remained an absolute shame that BBC Radio 3 failed to broadcast a concert of this monumental calibre.
Alexander Verney-Elliott