Category Archives: Orchestral

In concert – Alban Gerhardt, CBSO / Roderick Cox: Ravel, Saint-Saëns & Bartók

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Alban Gerhardt (cello), City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Roderick Cox

Ravel Ma mère l’Oye – suite (1910, orch. 1911)
Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto no.1 in A minor Op.33 (1872)
Bartók Concerto for Orchestra BB123 (1943, rev. 1945)

Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Thursday 16 February 2023 (2.15pm)

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

This afternoon’s concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra brought a judicious programme that not only looked effective on paper but worked well in practice, juxtaposing characteristic works by Ravel and Bartók alongside a favourite concerto from Saint-Saëns.

Although the extended ballet was championed by Simon Rattle during his CBSO tenure, the original five items constituting Ravel’s Mother Goose suite (the Prelude was included on the programme but (rightly) not in this performance) constitutes an attractive sequence and one that played to the orchestra’s strengths. Roderick Cox brought out the serene poignancy of Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane as fully as the winsome poise of Hop-o’-My-Thumb, with its delectable playing from woodwind. Neither was the piquant humour in Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas undersold, nor the stealthy interplay of gentility and earthiness in Dialogue of Beauty and the Beast. Initially a little muted in its rapture, The Fairy Garden built towards a finely sustained apotheosis whose unforced ecstasy was much in evidence.

Saint-Saëns has long enjoyed a following in Birmingham – not least his First Cello Concerto, which this reviewer first heard played by CBSO with the redoubtable Paul Tortelier almost a half-century ago. Evidently no stranger to this piece, Alban Gerhardt launched into the first of its three continuous movements with due purposefulness; pointing up the formal ingenuity as the composer interposes between what are nominally the exposition and development of a sonata design a ‘minuetto’ where soloist and muted strings render the principal themes at an oblique remove. The relatively extended final section can risk feeling diffuse, but Gerhardt’s focus brought a natural sense of intensification then resolution prior to the decisive close. The soulful opening Dialogo from Ligeti’s early Solo Cello Sonata provided an apposite encore.

A staple of the modern repertoire in almost as short a time as it took to be composed, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is a sure test for any such ensemble and one that the CBSO met with alacrity on this occasion. Setting a steady if never inflexible tempo for the Introduzione, Cox drew its contrasts of musing uncertainty and impulsive dynamism into a tensile and cohesive whole. Hardly less effective was the genial succession of duets in Giuoco delle coppie, set in relief by a brass chorale which makes for one of its composer’s most affecting inspirations.

Its sombreness marginally underplayed in its opening stages, the Elegia lacked nothing in eloquence at its climaxes or in its regretful closing bars, then a juxtaposing of folksong with Léhar and/or Shostakovich in the Intermezzo interrotto made for a heady while meaningful amalgam. It might not have followed-on attacca, but the Finale was otherwise the highlight of the reading – Cox as attentive to the music’s energetic and lyrical elements as to a central fugato whose initial fanfares return to cap the work, and this performance, in joyous abandon.

Born in Macon (Georgia) and currently based in Berlin, Cox is a fluent and assured presence such as helped make this an auspicious debut. The CBSO returns next week for an appealing programme with Ilan Volkov, featuring Isata Kanneh-Mason in Prokofiev’s Third Concerto.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the CBSO website. Click on the artist names for more on Roderick Cox and Alban Gerhardt.

In concert – Alice Coote, Philharmonia Orchestra / John Eliot Gardiner: The Sea and the Land: Mendelssohn, Elgar & Dvořák

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Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture Op.26 ‘Fingal’s Cave’ (1830, rev. 1832)
Elgar Sea Pictures Op.37 (1899)
Dvořák Symphony no.5 in F major Op.75 (1875, rev. 1887)

Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), Philharmonia Orchestra / John Eliot Gardiner

Royal Festival Hall, London
Thursday 16 February 2023

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Picture credits – John Eliot Gardiner (c) Sim Canetty-Clarke; Alice Coote (c) Jiyang Chen

This was an ultimately invigorating concert, using a cleverly constructed programme to look at how composers respond to the earth itself.

We began off the west coast of Scotland, the Inner Hebrides to be exact – and the uninhabited island of Staffa. Here it was that Mendelssohn saw Fingal’s Cave (above) in the summer of 1829. His musical response has become one of the composer’s best-loved pieces, an early and remarkably vivid example of the symphonic poem. Under John Eliot Gardiner, the Philharmonia Orchestra recounted the scene with remarkable accuracy, capturing the unusual, organ-like appearance of the landmark as well as the sea spray crashing around it. Gardiner steered a sure-footed and clear course through the water, aided by a wonderful clarinet duet from Mark van de Wiel and Laurent Ben Slimane in the second theme.

Alice Coote (above) then joined the orchestra, transporting us to the rarefied waters of Elgar’s Sea Pictures, the mezzo-soprano bringing to life five carefully chosen gems that took the composer far from his desk in Malvern in 1899. It took a while for singer and orchestra to achieve the optimum balance, so the words on the screen above were helpful as Coote found her feet. She did so quickly, and the somnambulant atmosphere of Sea Slumber-Song was cast, the strings lapping at the edges of Coote’s beautifully placed words. As she grew into the role so the gently rocking In Capri was attractively weighted and subtly intense.

Sabbath Morning At Sea was solemn yet soon reached for the heights, Coote’s innate grasp of the text matched by Gardiner’s control and shaping of the melodic line from the orchestra. The celebrated Where Corals Lie was perhaps inevitably the highlight, but The Swimmer ran it close, running all the way to a richly coloured high register from the singer at the end. Support came from the depths, too, with Alistair Young’s sensitive contribution on the Royal Festival Hall organ one to savour.

We returned to land for Dvořák’s Symphony no.5, the work with which he ‘rebooted’ his career as an orchestral composer in 1887, his publisher having spotted an opportunity to re-promote a piece finished in 1875. In this concert the parallel with the seasons was irresistible, the symphony’s first movement in particular resembling the flourishing of flowers in spring. Fleet footed strings were complemented by fresh faced woodwind, headed by the burbling clarinets who shone once again in the opening theme.

The Fifth is a sunny work, sitting in the shadow of the last three symphonies (nos.7-9) where live performances are concerned. As this concert revealed, however, it is a descendant of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, a work with considerable depth of its own and many different orchestral colours in which to revel. After a vivacious first movement, where Dvořák’s themes were given the best possible chance to shine, the cellos took the lead in their burnished opening to the romantic slow movement. This serious, minor key theme – surprisingly similar to the main tune of the Mendelssohn – was supplemented by an attractive, triple-time dance in the major key.

The slow movement segued effortlessly into the Scherzo, where the flurry of violins conjured up a vision of dancers trying to find their feet on the floor. The give and take between orchestral sections was a delight both to hear and to watch, as it was in the finale. The material here turns a little sour initially, Dvořák struggling manfully to regain the positive demeanour of the first movement. In Gardiner’s hands this was a compelling argument, ultimately won with the help of the superb Philharmonia brass, trombones punching out their melodies to thrilling effect. Once the ‘home’ key was reached the winter storms retreated and we basked in glorious musical sunshine, capping a fine evening where spring really did seem within touching distance.

You can read all about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the Philharmonia Orchestra website.

In concert – London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano: Richard Strauss, Coleridge-Taylor & Liszt

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Roman Simovic (violin), London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano

Coleridge-Taylor Ballade in A minor Op.33 (1898)
Liszt Die Ideale S106 (1856-7)
Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben Op. 40 (1898)

Barbican Hall, London
Sunday 12 February 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

It may have been his only concert this season with the orchestra of which he becomes Chief Conductor next year, but the rapport between Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra was audibly sustained through the whole of what proved a judiciously programmed concert.

Whether or not his Ballade (as commissioned for and premiered at a Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester) was inspired by music from a nearby street organist, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s work confirms the melodic fecundity and orchestral panache of his maturity. Its languorous slower episodes, framed by swifter sections of mounting energy, might not generate a more cumulative momentum, but the emotional immediacy of this piece overall is never less than appealing – certainly in a performance as vividly and precisely executed as that given tonight.

Pappano gave a memorable account of Liszt’s Eine Faust Symphonie four seasons ago, and it is good to see him exploring the mostly neglected orchestral output of this still misunderstood figure. The 12th of his symphonic poems, Die Ideale was written for the unveiling of a statue of Goethe and Schiller – a poem by the latter furnishing the conceptual basis of a piece which avoids programmatic or psychological excess for mostly lyrical and understated material; one whose deftly modified sonata design may well have been in Wagner’s mind when envisaging the symphony of the future. Pappano steered a cohesive course, building assuredly towards a triumphal if never bombastic apotheosis whose chordal writing for timpani (picked up on by Bruckner in his First Symphony nine years later) is merely its most striking musical attribute.

This conductor has made a fine recording of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben with Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and a similar combination of formal clarity alongside expressive intensity was evident here. Surging forward without indulgence, The Hero found due contrast in the sniping pettiness of The Hero’s Adversaries – consummately rendered by the LSO woodwind – then leader Roman Simovic took centre-stage for an unusually focussed take on The Hero’s Companion as culminated in rapturous euphony. Pappano’s underlying tempo for The Hero at Battle was a little too headlong, though never to the detriment of its textural density in what emerged as a purposeful development of the work’s myriad motifs; heading into a powerfully wrought climax at the beginning of The Hero’s Works of Peace.

It is in this penultimate section that the work’s pivoting between tone poem and symphony is most finely drawn, and Pappano duly underlined the numerous allusions to Strauss’s earlier pieces with due awareness of their place within the intricately conceived whole. Nor was the fateful transition into The Hero’s Resignation and Fulfilment uncharacterized, making this finale a culmination of the overall design and consummation of its intrinsic content. Whether or not the evocation of domestic bliss, there could be little doubt as to the music’s sincerity.

Contrary to latter-day presumptions, moreover, there was no evidence of the work’s revised ending as somehow tacked-on to what went before – Pappano drawing a Nietzschean ‘oneness’ from those closing bars which set the seal on a persuasive reading, and a memorable concert.

You can find out more about the 2022/23 season and book tickets at the London Symphony Orchestra website. Click on the artist names for more on Sir Antonio Pappano and Roman Simovic, while you can also read more about the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation

Online concert – Zoë Beyers, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods: Elcock: Violin Concerto

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Elcock Violin Concerto Op.13 (1996-2006)

Zoë Beyers (violin), English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Filmed at the Wyastone Concert Hall, Monmouth, Thursday 26 May 2022. Producer Phil Rowlands / Videographer Tim Burton

by Richard Whitehouse

The English Symphony Orchestra’s online schedule got off to a fine start for this year with a studio account of the Violin Concerto by composer-in-association Steve Elcock. It may have taken shape across nearly a decade, but the work is no less impressive for that. It also marks something of a transition from less ambitious pieces, often conceived with local musicians in mind, to the symphonic works as have recently been performed and recorded to great acclaim – whose formal as well as expressive concerns it anticipates and shares in various instances.

The concerto opens with an Allegro vivo whose rhythmic energy is maintained throughout, yet with sufficient contrast for its second theme to assume greater emotional emphasis in the reprise, prior to a forceful conclusion. The undoubted highlight is a Molto tranquillo whose haunting main theme, first unfolded by the soloist over undulating upper strings in a texture evidently inspired by change-ringing techniques, is a memorable inspiration. A pavane-like idea latterly comes into focus and the closing stage, which opens onto an eloquent plateau before evanescing almost regretfully into silence, lingers long in the memory. The finale is a relatively taut passacaglia whose theme accelerates through five variations from Andante to Presto, culminating in a combative ‘cadenza’ for violin and timpani then a decisive pay-off.

A tough challenge, indeed, for any soloist and one such as Zoë Beyers and the ESO, under Kenneth Woods, met with assurance over its 33 minutes. Aside from its sheer velocity, the first movement is notable for a close-knit interplay between soloist and orchestra here brought off with admirable precision, while the modal subtleties of the slow movement were deftly rendered as enhancements to its overall tonal trajectory. If its sequence of accelerating variations seemed to be over rather too soon, the finale was nevertheless a cohesive entity that saw this piece to a defiant conclusion.

Good to hear that this performance will be released commercially in due course, as a coupling for the Eighth Symphony which the ESO premiered in 2021 and the tone poem Wreck it gave last year – hence making for a persuasive overview of this increasingly significant composer.

This concert can be accessed free until 7 February 2023 at the English Symphony Orchestra website, but remains available through ESO Digital by way of a subscription. Meanwhile click on the names for more on the English Symphony Orchestra and Kenneth Woods, or on composer Steve Elcock

In concert – Members of the Philharmonia Orchestra / Olivia Clarke: Music of Today: Bryce Dessner

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Bryce Dessner
The Forest, Sederunt Principes (2019) (UK premiere)
Lachrimae (2012) (UK premiere)

Members of the Philharmonia Orchestra / Olivia Clarke

Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London
Thursday 2 February 2023

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Olivia Clarke picture (c) Rebecca Nead Menear

Bryce Dessner is surely the only composer able to list Taylor Swift, Paul Simon and the Philharmonia Orchestra among their musical accomplices. It is this multi-disciplined CV that makes him an excellent choice as Artist-in-Residence at the Southbank Centre – and this instalment of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s early evening Music of Today series allowed a look at his writing for string ensemble.

As well as namechecking the above artists, rock guitarist Dessner has a number of musical projects currently coming to the boil. His band The National (where his twin brother Aaron also plays) stand on the verge of their 9th album, prefaced by elegant single Tropic Morning News just over two weeks prior.

Meanwhile his string arrangements for the Malmö Symphony Orchestra help encapsulate the musical wonder of Complete Mountain Almanac, a project fronted by his sister Jessica and singer Rebekka Karijord. Their self-titled album, released in late January, has a folk-inflected beauty.

Dessner’s composition work also continues apace, and as this concert illustrated he is amassing an impressive and durable body of work. The Forest, for seven cellos, is not a nature poem as its title might suggest. Rather, it refers to the forest-like interiors of Notre Dame cathedral, all but destroyed in the dreadful fire of 2019. Dessner was in Paris at the time, and was moved to write a musical response. He considered the wood lost in the flames, pondering the sounds it would have absorbed through the ages, going back as far as Perotin’s 12th century motet Sederunt principes.

Taking this as his stimulus, Dessner weaves old and new together with a seamless join, the deeply historical source material given fresh if solemn context. The composer chooses not to use the swell of the cello sound too often, steering clear of cliches often found in writing for this instrumental combination. Instead the sounds are more subtle, the cellos often applying the wood of the bow to the string, decorating the sound and giving it acoustic context. In this way they present an absorbing collage of sounds, meditating on the lost material while projecting well beyond the size of the Purcell Room to evoke the vastness of the cathedral. Olivia Clarke (above) kept a firm hand on proceedings in what was a fine performance.

Lachrimae, as its title suggests, also looks to the distant past for inspiration. The source material here is John Dowland’s song of the same name, expanded by Dessner into a piece for a 12-piece string ensemble that also draws on Bartók’s Divertimento for strings. The piece starts by quoting its source material, but quickly projects it on to a wider musical canvas. In this performance there were pre-echoes of Dessner’s soundtrack for The Revenant three years later, these being colder textures with an equally compelling group of musical ideas.

Michael Fuller’s double bass was a central component of the more expansive writing, and the lower notes were played as though freshly dug from the ground itself. Meanwhile the upper strings traded motifs of power and poise, building energy and momentum impressively and inexorably – until suddenly all was still. The cold haze of a winter morning could be glimpsed in the mind’s eye, and the piece ended in the contemplative mood with which it began.

Olivia Clarke conducted another excellent, concentrated performance, aided by the forthright leadership of cellist Karen Stephenson. It may have been a short encounter, but this was a concert affirming Dessner as a composer whose progress should be closely monitored, fully justifying Steve Reich’s billing as ‘a major voice of his generation’.

You can watch a previous performance of The Forest on Facebook here:

For more information, visit the Bryce Dessner website – and for more on the Philharmonia’s free concert series Music of Today, visit their dedicated page