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Review
An evening of eccentric splendour at Saffron Hall, plus the best of April’s classical and jazz concerts
The Britten Sinfonia continue to make wonderful music - to an under-served part of the UK
What does an orchestra do when it receives a 100 per cent cut to its Arts Council of England funding, as happened to Britten Sinfonia last year? Answer: keep calm and carry on. Which means continuing to provide wonderful music-making, often of a daring kind, to under-served parts of Eastern England.
Sunday’s concert was a perfect example of what makes them treasurable. Two bankable stars were on the platform with the orchestra: horn player Ben Goldscheider, for a brand-new horn concerto by that gifted all-round musician Huw Watkins, and tenor Nicky Spence for the most famous song-cycle ever composed by an Englishman, Benjamin Britten’s Serenade. Alongside these were a rarely-heard early-ish work by the Master of the King’s Music Judith Weir, and to cap everything, perhaps the most brilliant and joyful symphony Mozart ever wrote, the “Haffner”.
So there was much to simply enjoy, but the opening piece, Weir’s “Heroic Strokes of the Bow” was quite a tough nut. Weir doesn’t do heroic, so it was a fair bet that this piece, based on a witty painting by Paul Klee, would make imperiously florid gestures and then immediately deflate them. And so it proved to be. The deflating gesture was more often than not a silence — indeed there were so many silences the piece seemed more a tattered rag than whole cloth. But the rags were so interestingly coloured, and the players concentration was so fierce and the rhythms so taut that by some miracle a satisfying if very quirky sense emerged from it all.
Compared to that Watkins’s new concerto seemed positively traditional. The more confident and fluent Watkins becomes as a composer, the more he feels free to flaunt his debts, most obviously to Britten and also (in this case) to Schumann’s dancing scherzos for horns, with possibly a hint of Mahler in the background. It was cast in the traditional three movements, beginning with a swaying pastorale with typical ‘leaping’ hunting-horn figures. The slow movement seemed as if it might be too obviously symmetrical, with two lyrical outer sections balanced against a dancing central one - until new horizons opened unexpectedly. The finale romped home in irregular Balkan-style rhythms, soloist Ben Goldscheider in perfect lockstep with the orchestra under conductor Michael Papadopoulos.
Britten’s Serenade, which sets gems of English poetry from Ben Johnson to Keats and Tennyson, was the only slight disappointment, not because Nicky Spence’s tenor voice didn’t ring out splendidly or the orchestra didn’t dance ecstatically. It was more that Spence’s tone, though winningly humorous when needed, was generally too extrovert. One missed the hooded corruption of William Blake’s “O Rose, thou art sick!”, and a sense of hushed mystery at the end.
After all that, to end with Mozart’s Haffner symphony felt exactly right. The players could revel in sheer uncomplicated joie de vivre, and we could, too. But that doesn’t mean subtlety was left behind. The high-stepping elegance of the middle movement was just as captivating as the high spirits of the finale.
Hear Britten Sinfonia play the same programme at Milton Court, London EC2 on Tuesday brittensinfonia.com
Manchester Camerata, The Stoller Hall ★★★★☆
To flourish in a city already provided with two fine symphony-sized orchestras the Manchester Camerata chamber orchestra has to be nimble on its feet. One week it plays core classical repertoire of Haydn and Mozart – including a complete Mozart piano concerto series – the next it intrigues us with a carefully curated event that mixes old and new in surprising ways.
Last night’s concert, in which the Camerata was joined by the Manchester-based chamber choir Kantos and Scottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill, was one of the latter kind. We heard nine shortish pieces ranging from the late 17th to the 21st centuries, unified by two things. There was an overall mood of spiritual uplift, darkening sometimes to an intense yearning to escape from an intolerable life, as in Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra, or a desire for God, as in Sally Beamish’s Showings. And there was the sound of a solitary bell, which ushered in Purcell’s choral piece Hear My Prayer, marked a solemn tread through Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten and Da Pacem Domine and rang out at key moments in Britten’s Phaedra.
All this showed care and imagination, an impression slightly marred by the annoyingly skimpy programme notes, which told us nothing about composer Nick Martin or his piece Fallings, or what the words were for Beamish’s piece. And not all the performances were a triumph, in fact Kantos’s opening performance of Henry Purcell’s hearty-stoppingly intense Hear My Prayer was distinctly shaky.
But the good things were very good. The way Pärt’s Cantus seems to emerge at a huge altitude from nothingness, like wisps of cloud, and gain heft and intensity as it descends, was beautifully caught. Nick Martin’s Fallings was a somewhat soft-centred lament, but the choir and orchestra together generated a real intensity in Beamish’s settings of poems by the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich.
In Britten’s Phaedra the evening abruptly switched from calm meditations on the hereafter to the burning shame of a queen who has to admit to the world that she lusts after her own son. Karen Cargill didn’t quite catch the unhinged despair of the opening section, but she was completely magnificent in the final moments as the queen takes poison, and sings of how the glorious day that she soiled by her presence will soon resume its purity.
Standing to the side of all this anguish was Michael Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. The abrupt switches from the striding Baroque dignity of Corelli’s original to Tippett’s rhapsodic ecstasies are hard to bring off, but the orchestra managed it beautifully. Under the disciplined but relaxed direction of Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes the music’s tangled melodic foliage burgeoned luxuriantly.
The concert’s end returned to its beginning, with more Purcell; we heard Karen Cargill, again regal and commanding in Dido’s Lament, and finally the choir and orchestra joined in lament over the dead queen. It was an apt ending to an evening which despite the occasional rough edge touched the heights – and the depths. IH
The Manchester Camerata plays the penultimate instalment of its complete Mozart Piano Concerto series with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet at The Stoller Hall on 17 May manchestercamerata.co.uk
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆
As its name suggests, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s mission is to offer ‘ancient’ classical music from Mozart and before, played with spine-tingling verve and more style than a Milan catwalk. Arrayed on the concert platform in front of you, you find an enticingly odd musical menagerie appropriate to the music: straight trumpets, old-fashioned valveless horns and primitive-looking oboes whose sound sometimes rasps against your ear, and sometimes seduces it.
On Wednesday night, the OAE looked very different. For a start, it was twice the normal size, with a positive army of strings and six double-basses instead of the normal two. The bassoons and oboes and horns looked more or less as they would in any orchestra. Most surprising of all was the programme: Grieg’s First Peer Gynt Suite, Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila overture, a rarity from Rachmaninov’s youth entitled The Rock and, to top it all, Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. It was less the “Age of Enlightenment”, more the age of volcanic national aspiration, expressed through folk-like sweetness, swooning romantic melody and (in the Sibelius) a feeling of oppression leading to triumphant release.
Venturing so far from one’s musical comfort zone could be enormously risky, but the OAE played this feast of northern-European romanticism as if to the manner born. It helped that joining them on the podium was that Russian firecracker of a conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev. He co-founded Il Pomo d’Oro, an orchestra very like the OAE, and also plays the harpsichord – but he also loves Romantic music. So, he’s just the right person to grasp the importance of getting the right period sound (we weren’t told, but judging from the tone those were genuine late-19th-century instruments we were looking at) while making us thrill to the music’s full-blooded expressiveness.
Granted, Emelyanychev’s hyperactive podium manner is distracting to behold, and there were times when his determination to reach into the musical texture and pull out this or that enticing detail went too far. But mostly, this concert was a joy. Glinka’s overture sped by like a perfectly calibrated hurricane, while Rachmaninov’s early piece was like kaleidoscope of fantasy colours, here a touch of Wagner, there a whiff of late Rimsky-Korsakov, and even a bit of early Stravinsky. Grieg’s suite is one of those pieces regularly described as “hackneyed”, but thanks to Emelyanychev’s subtle pacing and attention to detail it recovered all its mystery and delicate pathos.
Finally came Sibelius’s symphony, and here it soon became clear why an orchestra devoted to old music might be right for a proto-modernist symphony in which vastly slow music morphs into blistering speed, before your very ears. There’s no sheen on the OAE’s sound, no luxurious blend. Everything stands out in its own fresh colours, so the grinding of musical layers moving at different speeds jumps out in sharp relief.
Sibelius’s amazing radicalism stood nakedly revealed, thanks to an orchestra raised on Haydn and Mozart. It’s a paradox, but an invigorating one, and a reminder that music can feel like a revelation of a mystery as much as a joy. IH