As galas go, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra celebrating the opening of its fourth year under Chief Conductor and Artistic Director David Robertson was pretty impressive. Australian audiences have been fortunate that Maxim Vengerov has been a regular visitor to our shores in recent years, and his performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto was suitably spectacular, but Robertson’s compelling reading of Tchaikovsky’s popular Fifth Symphony yielded nothing to it in terms of fire power and intellectual engagement.

^{Maxim Vengerov and the SSO. Photos by Ken Butti}

Robertson treated the Brahms to a rich, measured opening, crisping things up with an added urgency to launch the solo line. Vengerov utilised just sufficient Viennese slurring to give the work an authentic late-19th-century feel, yet his manner was equally in the grand 20th-century Russian tradition with rock-solid technique and pinpoint intonation allied to a glorious golden tone, especially strong in the upper register. A magnetic artist, he is a true poet of the violin, and nowhere more so than in the detailed development of the opening theme. The second subject, too, was given plenty of space by both conductor and soloist (there was a great sense...