Category Archives: Orchestral

In concert – April Fredrick, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods: Mozart, Richard Strauss, Doolittle & Dvořák

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Mozart Adagio and Fugue in C minor K546 (1783, rev 1788)
Richard Strauss (arr. Burke) Morgen! Op.27 no.4 (1894)
Doolittle A Short, Slow Life (2011)
Dvořák (arr. Burke) Rusalka B203 – Song to the Moon (1900)
Mozart Symphony no.39 in E flat major K543 (1788)

April Fredrick (soprano), English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Great Malvern Priory, Malvern
Wednesday 15 June 2022

Written by Richard Whitehouse

This latest concert in its current season found the English Symphony Orchestra back at the Priory in Great Malvern in a programme with, at its centre, a contrasting triptych of vocal items from April Fredrick which continued her Affiliate Artist role in impressive fashion.

At its centre was a performance (the UK premiere?) of A Short, Slow Life, Emily Doolittle’s setting of a poem which finds Elizabeth Bishop at her most Dickinson-like with its reflection on growing up in a seeming Arcady latterly undone as much by existential as environmental factors. Enfolding and intricate, its scoring for nine instruments offers an evocative context for the vocal line to emerge from and with which to interact – Fredrick making the most of their dialogue in this winsome and, thanks to Kenneth Woods, finely co-ordinated reading.

Either side came chamber reductions from Tony Burke. In Morgen!, Strauss’s setting of John Henry Mackay, it was the understatement of Fredrick’s approach that compelled by drawing this relatively early song into the emotional orbit of those from half-a-century later. In ‘Song to the Moon’ from Dvořák’s opera Rusalka, her unaffected eloquence arguably came through more directly in an arrangement that (rightly) predicated the soloistic nature of the orchestral writing. Technically immaculate, Fredrick’s artistry was itself never less than life-affirming.

Framing this programme came two not unrelated works by Mozart. Written in 1783 when the composer was extending the formal and expressive weight of his music by intensive study of Bach and Handel, this C minor Fugue’s two-piano austerity took on a greater richness when arranged for strings and prefaced by a brief if searching Adagio which throws its successor’s contrapuntal density into greater relief. The ESO duly responded with playing of sustained trenchancy that incidentally reminded one no less than Beethoven took its example to heart.

Having given perceptive accounts of Mozart’s 40th and 41st symphonies earlier this season, it made sense that Woods and the ESO to include the 39th as opens what increasingly seems a symphonic triptych in design and intent. This performance was no less idiomatic – the first movement’s introductory Adagio imposing yet flexible so that its ‘heroic’ quality with those wrenching harmonies was never in doubt, the main Allegro building up tangible momentum through a tensile development then an even briefer coda decisive in its impetus and sweep.

Even more than its successors, the Andante is the heart of the work – among the most striking instances of that ineffable pathos Mozart made his own. Inward while with no lack of forward motion, it made a telling foil to the Menuetto with its bracing outer sections and a trio which featured a delectable expressive pause prior to a last hearing of the clarinet’s amiable melody. Nor was there any lack of wit in the scintillating finale, the repeat of its second half necessary for one of Mozart’s rare incursions into the ‘false ending’ beloved of Haydn to leave its mark. A fine conclusion, then, to another worthwhile concert by the ESO which returns early next month for a very different, all-American programme that includes a rare outing for the full-length version (including the ‘hurricane’ episode) of Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring.

For further information on April Fredrick, click here, and for more on Emily Doolittle click here. To find out more about the artists, click on the names for more Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra.

Online concert – Raphael Wallfisch, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods: Elgar Reimagined

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Elgar, arr. Fraser Miniatures for cello and strings: Chanson de Matin; Chanson de Nuit; The Wild Bears (Wand of Youth Suite No.2); Nimrod (Enigma Variations); Romance Op.62; Sospiri Op.70; Mazurka; Pleading; In Moonlight; Salut d’Amour; Adieu

Raphael Wallfisch (cello), English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Live performance at Guildhall, Worcester, 29 October 2021

by Richard Whitehouse

An afternoon concert at last year’s Elgar Festival, these Miniatures for cello and strings had been arranged by Donald Fraser for Raphael Wallfisch. Extending to an 11-movement suite, its viability in terms of smaller groupings was certainly demonstrated by this performance.

Chanson de Matin provided a mellifluous entrée, and if the cello’s assumption of the melodic line marginally obscured the strings’ contribution, that could not be said of Chanson de Nuit whose sombre inwardness was unerringly realized. Nor did The Wild Bears lose on impetus, and if the arrangement conjured Saint-Saëns, this only served to underline the importance of ‘Second Empire’ music on Elgar’s own thinking. Interesting, too, how the Romance brought soloist and strings into an even closer accord than the composer’s version with orchestra. The highlight, however, was Sospiri, for presenting one of Elgar’s finest inspirations in a striking new light. Salut d’Amour then conveyed the music’s essence without cloying, but the cello’s dominance in Nimrod detracted from its subtlety of orchestration as an ‘Enigma Variation’.

A wistful take on Adieu provided an affecting encore, but almost all these pieces would make a viable such item after the Cello Concerto or another British concertante work. What was a relaxed occasion does not imply any less commitment from Wallfisch and the English String Orchestra, heard to advantage with Kenneth Woods in the acoustic of Worcester’s Guildhall. The Miniatures sequence can be heard in full on Elgar Reimagined (Lyrita), but this selection offered an attractive contrast to those larger symphonic works heard elsewhere at the festival.

These works are available for viewing on the English Symphony Orchestra website, by way of a subscription or free trial. Further information on the Elgar Reimagined series can be found here. Meanwhile click on the names for more on Raphael Wallfisch, the English Symphony Orchestra and Kenneth Woods

In concert – London Symphony Orchestra & Sir Antonio Pappano – Respighi & Dallapiccola

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Respighi Vetrate di Chiesa (1925-6)
Dallapiccola Il prigioniero (1944-8) {Sung in Italian with English surtitles]

Ángeles Blancas Gulín (soprano – Mother), Eric Greene (baritone – Prisoner), Stefano Secco (tenor – Gaoler / Grand Inquisitor), Egor Zhuravskii (tenor – First Priest), Chuma Sijeqa (bass-baritone – Second Priest), London Symphony Chorus, Guildhall School Singers, London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano

Barbican Hall, London

Sunday 5 June 2022

Written by Richard Whitehouse Pictures (c) Mark Allan Photography

This second of the London Symphony Orchestra’s two concerts of Italian music with chief conductor designate Sir Antonio Pappano consisted of two pieces that brought the aesthetic and political divisions of Italy between the world wars into acute while always productive focus.

It might have originated in piano pieces written for his wife, but Respighi’s Church Windows duly emerged among the most opulent and evocative of his orchestral works. That both title and subtitles were postpriori additions does not lessen their relevance – not least as concerns The Flight into Egypt, its tense understatement a telling foil to the ensuing Saint Michael the Archangel with its warlike images rendered graphically by brass and percussion, before climaxing in one of the most theatrical of tam-tam crashes as Satan is banished from Heaven.

Not that Respighi was averse to gentler expression as appropriate, The Matins of Saint Clare featuring orchestration of unfailing finesse on its raptly expressive course. Inevitably, it is the magisterial finale of Saint Gregory the Great when this composer comes most fully into his own – its cumulative fervour drawing on all aspects of the sizable forces for what becomes a heady apotheosis. Music, indeed, that needs to be realized with discipline and focus to avoid overkill, which was certainly the case in a performance where the LSO left nothing to chance.

The London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Chorus conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano perform Ottorino Respighi Church Windows Luigi Dallapiccola Il prigioniero In the Barbican Hall (Ángeles Blancas Gulin Mother, Eric Greene Prisoner, Stefano Secco Gaoler / Grand Inquisitor, Egor Zhuravskii First priest, Chuma Sijeqa Second priest ) on Friday, 3 June 2022. Photo by Mark Allan

Whereas Respighi pays (indirect) tribute to Italy’s cultural greatness, Dallapiccola exposes its darker recesses in his one-act opera The Prisoner. Composed over several years that span the decline and fall of Mussolini’s Italian empire, its libretto is drawn from the novel by the late 19th century author Villiers de l’Isle-Adam whose title Torture by Hope became subtitle for this opera by intimating the culmination of a scenario set during one of the grimmest periods in the Spanish Inquisition. By this time, Dallapiccola had evolved that distinctively personal brand of serialism which served him thereafter, but his knowledge of and devotion to Italian opera meant that those more methodical or systematic aspects are harnessed to an emotional fervour as makes for a consistently powerful and often moving while harrowing experience.

The performance was a compulsive one – centred upon Eric Greene’s assumption of the title-role that built gradually to an apex of elation suddenly and cruelly denied. The opening stage is dominated by the Mother – rendered with unfailing charisma yet never wanton melodrama by Ángeles Blancas Gulín, and Stefano Secco brought hardly less conviction to the twin-role of the Gaoler whose urgings to remain steadfast assume a chilling tone when he is revealed as the Grand Inquisitor. There were telling cameos from Egor Zhuruvskii and Chuma Sijeqa as the Priests, with the London Symphony Chorus and Guildhall School Singers combining to potent effect in offstage Psalm settings – the final one a climax of sombre grandeur. Pappano directed with absolute assurance an opera he doubtless, and rightly so, ranks with the finest.

It brought this enterprising and superbly executed concert to an impressive close. One only hopes Pappano will have the opportunity to programme further such music over the coming seasons: the enthusiastic response suggested an almost full house would be there it hear it.

To read more on the London Symphony Orchestra’s current season, visit their website. For more information on the artists involved, click on the names for Antonio Pappano, Ángeles Blancas Gulín, Eric Greene, Stefano Secco, Egor Zhuravskii and Chuma Sijega

In concert – London Symphony Orchestra & Sir Antonio Pappano – Petrassi, Puccini & De Sabata

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G. Gabrieli Canzoni – primi toni a 8; duodecimi toni a 8 (c1597)
Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins in B minor RV580 / Op.3/10
Petrassi Concerto for Orchestra No. 5 (1954-5)
Puccini Capriccio sinfonico (1883)
De Sabata Juventus (1919)

Benjamin Gilmore, Julia Ungureanu, Julián Gil Rodríguez, Thomas Norris (violins), London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano

Barbican Hall, London

Thursday 2 June 2022

Written by Richard Whitehouse

What better way to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee than with two concerts providing a decent overview of Italian orchestral music with the London Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor designate Sir Antonio Pappano. That relatively little of this music has managed to enter the standard repertoire only makes revivals such as these the more worthwhile.

Tonight’s programme began off-stage with two Canzoni by Giovanni Gabrieli played by LSO brass from the centre of the lower circle – Pappano facing the audience to conduct. Although a more spacious and terraced acoustic would have presented these to better advantage, their hieratic grandeur as well as intricately contrapuntal texture was an admirable foil to Vivaldi‘s Concerto for Four Violins which followed onstage. Published in his ground-breaking collection L’estro armonico, its bracing outer Allegros frame a brief while unpredictable Largo whose disjunctive contrasts of tempo and technique brought the best out of a quartet drawn from the LSO front desks and notably well-matched in temperament.

From the early 18th to mid-20th century was less of an aesthetic wrench than might be thought, the Fifth Concerto for Orchestra by Goffredo Petrassi embodying various of those facets as set out by his musical antecedents. Written for the Boston Symphony and long-serving director Charles Munch, this is arguably the most representative of its composer’s eight such works in its amalgam of technical virtuosity with that personal adaptation of serial thinking which Petrassi pursued during the post-war era. Moreover, its outwardly simple format of two movements each following a slow-fast trajectory belies a subtler and more organic evolution – such that an atmospheric prelude intensifies into a capricious scherzo whose provisional close makes possible what follows. Here, an increasingly restive intermezzo elides into a Dionysian toccata with brass and percussion to the fore – then a pensive epilogue returns the music to the inwardness from which it had emerged. A superb performance from the LSO, and a timely revival of this not so minor masterpiece.

His operas brought the orchestral component of Italian opera to a new level of sophistication, but Puccini wrote little for orchestra alone. Essentially his graduation exercise, Capriccio sinfonico is equally a ‘statement of intent’ with its unfolding from a sombre opening (later to be redeployed in Edgar), through an energetic central phase (its main idea familiar as the opening of La bohème), to a modified reprise of that first section which brings about a gently fatalistic close. Pappano duly guided the LSO through an assured reading of music known ‘by default’, making one regret that Puccini’s later focus on opera to the virtual exclusion of all else left no comparable orchestral work from his maturity.

Much the same might be said of Victor de Sabata (above), whose international career as a conductor from his late thirties left him with little time or inclination to compose. A sequence of symphonic poems from around the early 1920s confirms sure mastery of the orchestra, and if Juventus is hardly the deepest of these, its dramatic flair and gestural immediacy are not to be gainsaid. Here, too, there is a three-part structure – the vaunting aspiration of youth becoming subsumed into the trials and setbacks which come with experience, before a revival of those earlier convictions ensures a close of blazing affirmation. Other composers might have invested such a sequence with a dialectical sense of change and attainment, but de Sabata is content to take these implications at face value – while investing his music with a greater subtlety and resourcefulness than it has often been credited for (not least by the writer of this evening’s programme note). This was certainly evident in Pappano’s take on a piece which could yet attract plaudits for other than its name.

As if mindful of the context in which this concert was heard, Pappano opened the second half with a rendering of the National Anthem – somewhat to the surprise of an audibly bemused audience, and presumably not to be repeated for Sunday’s follow-up programme that features Respighi and Dallapiccola at their (very different) communicative best.

To read more on the London Symphony Orchestra’s current season, visit their website

In concert – Zoë Beyers, English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods: Celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

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Beethoven Egmont, Op. 84 – Overture (1809-10)
Elcock Violin Concerto, Op. 13 (1996-2006) [UK premiere]
Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending (1914/20); Symphony no.5 in D major (1938-43)

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

Routh Hall, Bromsgrove School
Friday 27 May 2022

There will be many concerts over the next fortnight celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, but few (if any) of more substance than that given tonight by the English Symphony Orchestra with its principal conductor Kenneth Woods, taking place on the attractive campus of Bromsgrove School some miles from Birmingham.

It might not have been written for this occasion, but the Violin Concerto by the ESO’s current composer-in-association Steve Elcock (above) was no less impressive for that. This marks something of a transition from those less ambitious pieces written for local musicians and the symphonic works now being recorded to great acclaim. It opens with an Allegro vivo whose rhythmic energy is maintained throughout, yet with enough expressive contrast for its second theme to assume greater expressive emphasis in the reprise. The highlight is a Molto tranquillo whose haunting main theme, initially unfolded by the soloist over undulating upper strings in a texture inspired by change-ringing techniques, is a memorable inspiration. A pavane-like idea later comes into focus and the closing stage, opening onto an eloquent plateau before evanescing into silence, lingers in the memory. The finale is a Passacaglia whose theme accelerates in five variations from Andante to Presto, culminating in a ‘cadenza’ for violin and timpani then a decisive pay-off.

A tough challenge, indeed, for any soloist and one which Zoë Beyers met with assurance over its 30-minute course. Aside from its sheer velocity the first movement is notable for a close-knit interplay between soloist and orchestra that was brought off with admirable precision, while the modal subtleties of the slow movement were rendered as enhancements to its overall tonal trajectory. Aside from a slight falling away of tension toward its centre, the finale saw the piece to a forceful close. Good to hear these performers recorded it prior to this performance, as a coupling to the Eighth Symphony that the ESO premiered last year, and which should be released over the coming months.

Beyers returned after the interval to launch a Vaughan Williams second-half (this year being the 150th anniversary of his birth) with The Lark Ascending. Easy to take for granted now that it is so frequently performed, the piece can still work its magic in an attentive rendering such as this. The underlying tempo might have been on the slow side, but the elegance and poise invested into the solo line were not to be gainsaid, nor was the translucency of orchestral textures which Kenneth Woods shaped with due restraint through the folk-like central section then into the easeful closing pages. Suffice to add that the unaccompanied final bars held those present spellbound with their artlessness.

There was at least as much to admire in the reading of VW’s Fifth Symphony which here followed on inevitably. A steady overall tempo for the Preludio did not exclude a palpable accumulation of energy in its development, nor a build-up of real fervency with the thrilling re-entry of its second theme. Understated it may be, but the Scherzo is replete with rhythmic quirks and while these were not always ideally negotiated, the music’s sardonic humour and ultimate evaporation were tellingly rendered. Doubtless this work’s emotional heart, the Romanza was admirably realized in its gradual coalescing of hymnal and folk-inflected elements towards a nobly wrought apex, but Woods kept enough in reserve so the final Passacaglia never risked becoming an anti-climax. It earlier stages conveyed  an emotional release as is countered by the ensuing anxiety then fateful reappearance of the work’s opening theme, subsiding into a coda which feels as much a benediction now as when it was first heard almost eight decades ago.

Beethoven‘s overture to Goethe’s Egmont might have seemed anomalous in this context but, as Woods pointed out in his opening remarks, the heroes and villains of 16th-century ‘Spanish Netherlands’ were not so far removed from those of today and, as the heady closing pages reminded us, triumph over adversity can never be taken for granted.

For further information on Steve Elcock, click here to visit his dedicated site, and for more on Vaughan Williams click here. To find out more about the artists, click on the names for more on Zoë Beyers, Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra.