Aurora Orchestra/Collon
BBCSO/Vedernikov
My eyelids never droop in an Aurora Orchestra concert. Too much going on. But they called this one “Insomnia” anyway. It was a title that reflected the nocturnal music — everything from Vivaldi’s phantasmagoric La Notte flute concerto and James MacMillan’s nightmarish and sardonic violin mini-concerto A Deep But Dazzling Darkness to the incessant ticking of Ligeti’s Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes (mercifully left to run down while we all went for a drink) and even Paul McCartney’s Blackbird (singing in the dead of night, of course).
But it also reflected the imaginative presentation, artfully enhanced by the lighting designer William Reynolds: often in near-darkness, with the tenor Allan Clayton restlessly drifting round the hall like a bearded Lady Macbeth during Ivor Gurney’s poignant song Sleep, and the wind players creeping into the light as required during Britten’s Nocturne — a touch of visual drama that emphasised Britten’s masterstroke of not using them all together until the final song’s cataclysmic Mahlerian climax.
There was something rather after-hours, too, about the sepulchral timbres that predominated: the sinister, rocking strings in the Nocturne (superbly balanced by the conductor, Nicholas Collon); Iain Farrington’s ethereally wispy arrangements of Gurney and McCartney, and Thomas Adès’s dark- hued version of Couperin’s enigmatic keyboard work Les Barricades Mistérieuses. Clayton doesn’t yet have Peter Pears’s ability to spin endless lines, but he sang with insight and intelligence; the violinist Thomas Gould and the flautist Jane Mitchell were compelling in their respective concertos.
It was a much noisier show the night before at the Barbican, when the BBC Symphony Orchestra blasted through Shostakovich’s Symphony No 8 under the Bolshoi’s former principal conductor, Alexander Vedernikov — a man who doesn’t accept a meagre fff when ffffff is possible. But this twisted, tortured and traumatic work, expressing heaven knows what wartime and totalitarian horrors, needs that brutal impact, and for such punchiness one forgave some untuneful and scrappy moments.
Earlier, Vedernikov had surprised everyone by shaping a persuasive account of very British music: Tippett’s unfairly neglected Piano Concerto, with its unexpected nods to Beethoven and Brahms, and its off-kilter country- dance finale. Steven Osborne made something very lyrical out of the clotted solo part.
Source.
BBCSO/Vedernikov
My eyelids never droop in an Aurora Orchestra concert. Too much going on. But they called this one “Insomnia” anyway. It was a title that reflected the nocturnal music — everything from Vivaldi’s phantasmagoric La Notte flute concerto and James MacMillan’s nightmarish and sardonic violin mini-concerto A Deep But Dazzling Darkness to the incessant ticking of Ligeti’s Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes (mercifully left to run down while we all went for a drink) and even Paul McCartney’s Blackbird (singing in the dead of night, of course).
But it also reflected the imaginative presentation, artfully enhanced by the lighting designer William Reynolds: often in near-darkness, with the tenor Allan Clayton restlessly drifting round the hall like a bearded Lady Macbeth during Ivor Gurney’s poignant song Sleep, and the wind players creeping into the light as required during Britten’s Nocturne — a touch of visual drama that emphasised Britten’s masterstroke of not using them all together until the final song’s cataclysmic Mahlerian climax.
There was something rather after-hours, too, about the sepulchral timbres that predominated: the sinister, rocking strings in the Nocturne (superbly balanced by the conductor, Nicholas Collon); Iain Farrington’s ethereally wispy arrangements of Gurney and McCartney, and Thomas Adès’s dark- hued version of Couperin’s enigmatic keyboard work Les Barricades Mistérieuses. Clayton doesn’t yet have Peter Pears’s ability to spin endless lines, but he sang with insight and intelligence; the violinist Thomas Gould and the flautist Jane Mitchell were compelling in their respective concertos.
It was a much noisier show the night before at the Barbican, when the BBC Symphony Orchestra blasted through Shostakovich’s Symphony No 8 under the Bolshoi’s former principal conductor, Alexander Vedernikov — a man who doesn’t accept a meagre fff when ffffff is possible. But this twisted, tortured and traumatic work, expressing heaven knows what wartime and totalitarian horrors, needs that brutal impact, and for such punchiness one forgave some untuneful and scrappy moments.
Earlier, Vedernikov had surprised everyone by shaping a persuasive account of very British music: Tippett’s unfairly neglected Piano Concerto, with its unexpected nods to Beethoven and Brahms, and its off-kilter country- dance finale. Steven Osborne made something very lyrical out of the clotted solo part.
Source.
Aurora Orchestra/Collon at LSO St Luke’s, EC1; BBCSO/Vedernikov at the Barbican
Richard MORRISON, The Times, March 24, 2013
