Vengerov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic triumph

Audiences have had a long wait for the return of Maxim Vengerov. One of the world's greatest violinists, he hasn't been heard for several years due to health problems, conducting and teaching commitments. Even then his appearance with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic was by default, courtesy of Martha Argerich, who pulled out of a performance of Ravel's Concerto in G a few weeks ago.

Hardly surprisingly then that his first steps into Prokofiev's First Violin concerto proved a trifle inauspicious, the dashing virtuoso of old seemingly feeling his way into the swing of things. In the first movement the tone was less full, more lean, which somehow fitted with the more brittle passages of the grotesque second section but less with the "dreamy" opening part. The fiendishly difficult pyrotechnics of the second movement scherzo were efforlessly…