The
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was back in town this Saturday 8 March at the
Brighton Dome for their second concert this year. The concert had the title 'An English
Idyll', and was devoted to English music by Elgar, Delius and Vaughan
Williams.
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| Petroc Trelawny |
They
also brought along a presenter, Petroc Trelawny, to introduce the pieces and
briefly interview Tasmin Little and David Hill.
Some may find this populist touch intrusive or patronising, but it's a
great way of engaging the audience, and Petroc struck just the right note,
keeping his introductions brief and appropriate, and as a result, drawing the
audience into the performance. So often,
the audience can be ignored, and concert going can feel a very passive
experience, as if one is just observing the performers playing for their own
enjoyment. I've not seen the Bournemouth
Symphony Orchestra perform that many times since the days of Marin Alsop
conducting, but I suspect this approach stems from her habit of turning and
talking to the audience in much the same way.
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| David Hill (photo: John Wood) |
The concert began with Elgar's The Wand of
Youth Suite No. 2. Elgar wrote the
tunes for both suites as a boy, to be used in a play that he and his young
siblings planned as a protest against some strict decision by their
parents. The plot takes two bad-tempered
old people to a fantasy land where they are reminded of the joys and
tribulations of youth. Evidence is mixed
as to whether the play was actually ever performed, but Elgar wrote the tunes
down in his notebook, and then some fifty years later, he orchestrated them,
creating two orchestral suites. The
second has six short movements, characterising images such as Moths and
Butterflies, The Tame Bear, and The Wild Bears. The orchestration is light and effective,
particularly in the use of the glockenspiel in The Little Bells, and the
alternating string and woodwind arpeggios in the Fountain Dance. The Wild Bears provides a lively finish,
and is often performed on its own as an orchestral encore. Some of David Hill's tempi were a little on
the sluggish side, and as a result the performance took a while to get going,
with a few moments of less than precise ensemble. However, the finer subtleties of the
orchestration, particularly in The Little Bells, were treated with great
delicacy.
They
followed this with Delius' The Walk to the Paradise Garden. Another piece with origins outside the
concert hall, Delius composed this as an interlude in his opera, A Village
Romeo and Juliet. In the opera, the
two lovers, renamed as Sali and Vreli, make the journey to the Paradise Garden,
before their inevitable death together in the river. The music is sensual, and surprisingly
uplifting, given what fate has in store for the young lovers. The opening contains beautifully scored music
for the woodwind, and after slight initial tentativeness, the Bournemouth
players produced an appropriately tender, warm tone. This was matched by some sensitive, rich
string playing too, and overall this was an enjoyable performance. Hill coaxed real expression from the
orchestra, and deftly handled the rhapsodic nature of Delius' writing.
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| Tasmin Little (photo: Melanie Winner) |
The
first half ended with a real treat, and by now the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra and Hill had definitely warmed to their task. They were joined by violinist Tasmin Little
for Vaughan Williams' popular masterpiece, The Lark Ascending. In my recent review of her new recording of
the work with the BBC Philharmonic and Sir Andrew Davis, I noted how both
Little and the orchestra managed to make such a familiar work sound new and
inspiring, and again here Little showed that despite the many times she must
have performed this live, she can still communicate the freshness and immediacy
of the piece. She also communicated
constantly with the orchestra, responding to the different sections as they
took up the melodies. Except for some
less than perfect intonation from the horn section once or twice, the orchestra
supported and responded to the soloist admirably, making this a most enjoyable
performance all round.
The
second half of the concert was given over to Elgar's Symphony No. 1 in A
flat major, and here Hill finally appeared totally in command and in his
stride, eliciting a magnificent performance from the Bournemouth Symphony
Orchestra. Like many others before him,
Elgar waited a long time before composing his first symphony, perhaps feeling
the weight of expectation, and the great symphonists that had gone before. Yet when it came, Elgar's Symphony No. 1
proved to be a huge success, described by Hans Richter as 'the greatest
symphony of modern times', and it was performed nearly one hundred times in the
first year alone. The orchestration is
rich and lavish, yet Elgar uses great contrasts in texture too. The opening noble theme sets us off perhaps
expecting Elgar in Pomp and Circumstance mode, but the jump from A flat
to D minor for the restless Allegro shocks us out of this very quickly. The Scherzo is also turbulent, even
sinister, and we've now travelled to F sharp minor, with a B flat major Trio,
with its Mahlerian violin solo. The
beautiful Adagio, which follows directly after the Scherzo without
a break, prompted a standing ovation at the first performance. The final movement has incredibly full string
textures, with the string sections subdivided several times, and the triumphant
return of the opening noble theme returns with a blaze of trumpets for a
rousing finish. David Hill judged the
changes in tempo, texture and mood brilliantly throughout, and the string
players in particular excelled, conquering the somewhat dry acoustic of
Brighton Dome with great depth of tone.
Gone was any sense of tentativeness or unsure ensemble from earlier in
the evening, and this was a thoroughly engaging and lively performance of this
great symphony.
