Sakari Oramo's inaugural concert with BBC Symphony

Sakari Oramo

Sakari Oramo’s inaugural concert as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave opportunities to explore existing preoccupations – theirs and his. Oramo – no stranger to the British music world after ten years at the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – brought Mahler to the table, a composer with whom he’s had an affinity for some time. The Beeb, for their part, brought a substantial premiere by respected French composer Tristan Murail, affirming a commitment to contemporary music unparalleled among London’s symphony orchestras.

The title itself of Murail’s new piece, Reflections/Reflets, presages elements of the first of the piece’s two movements. Murail takes as his starting point Charles Baudelaire’s poem Spleen, not set vocally but rather painted in heavy orchestral sound. The poem’s bells are there, tolling grimly at the first part’s climax and the thick texture truly makes sonic sense of the opening line “When the low and heavy sky presses like a lid”. It’s the skewed tuning, though, that most clearly stems from that title – a cluster of wind instruments, just slightly off the pitching of the rest of the orchestra, distorts everything we hear, offering a cracked double image or a sullied reflection.

The second part, “High Voltage/Haute Tension”, darts of with a nervous energy not possible in the first. Pointed piano writing underlies much of the skittish but virtuosic orchestral writing, setting off waves of upward-reaching scales that couldn’t be further removed from the weighty import of the “Spleen” music. Murail intends these movements to be the first in a cycle of pieces, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra launched them with terrific power and commitment in this world premiere performance.

Something of the febrile energy of “High Voltage” was echoed in Shostakovich’s Concerto for piano, trumpet and strings of 1933 (sometimes dubbed Piano Concerto No.1), particularly so here with the hyper-detailed pianism of Olli Mustonen. I hadn’t seen Mustonen live before this concert, having encountered him only through his recordings, but in the event the visuals matched the eccentric intellectualism projected by his playing. Mustonen lets no phrase rise and fall smoothly, preferring to poke odd notes and send them out into the audience like barbs. His hands fly sometimes a foot from the keyboard, striking from a height and only increasing that sense of jaunty, jolting phrasing. It’s love-it-or-hate-it playing, sounding nothing like anyone else I’ve ever heard, but there’s something curiously disarming about it, as though Mustonen is dreaming his own quirky musical fantasy and allowing us to peek over his shoulder.

The obligato trumpet part was here taken by Russian star Sergei Nakariakov, whose quivering vibrato and silken tone were quite distinct from Mustonen’s angularity, but they shared a stingingly incisive rhythmic sense that made for a tremendously exciting finale. A little more tightness from the accompanying strings would have raised the performance even more, but with so much to intrigue and entertain, it seems churlish to complain. I can’t imagine that I’d want to listen to Mustonen’s wacky phrasing for too long, though.

If Oramo’s contribution has gone uncommented upon until now, it’s because the final item – Mahler’s First Symphony – was always going to be the test of his command and ability. He set down an admired recording with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra a couple of years ago and here proved that he has something fresh and engaging to say in what is very frequently trodden repertoire. I say fresh not so much in that his view is wholly original, but rather that his approach drew out all that is youthful and hopeful from this mighty work. His motions on the podium suggested strongly that flow and lyricism were priorities, bringing out this music’s roots in song (Mahler does, after all, make heavy reference to his earlier song cycle Leider eines fahrenden Gesellen). I’ve rarely heard the scherzo infused with such a vigorous sense of dance, or the first movement’s climactic explosion of light more awake and alert. Along the way, he was given many moments of fine playing from the orchestra – some crisp offstage brass, gutsy string playing and that double bass solo negotiated with poise. What was missing, perhaps, was a real sense of polish and refinement from the BBC SO. It sometimes seemed that Oramo was pushing for more dynamic contrast that he was receiving in return, and while there were never issues of ensemble, I missed the beauty of sound of which this orchestra is capable. As inaugural concerts go, though, this was a promising one – a strong sense here of a conductor with firm priorities and an orchestra capable of delivering what he asks.    

This review originally appeared as a guest posting for Classical Iconoclast.

Week 1 at the BBC Proms

Another Proms season judders into life, like a massive classical music Olympiad. Of course, this year, there’s another festival of remarkable human achievement going on up the road, promising to make London a no-go area for a chunk of the summer. But Prommers are hardy folk, and they’ll continue to fill the Royal Albert Hall somehow.

The First Night was a curiously programmed celebration of British music. Despite good intentions, I never did hear the whole thing, sampling only Mark Anthony Turnage’s Canon Fever. It caused a lot of ire over at The Guardian but seemed a fairly innocuous example of the contemporary music that gets some people so het up. The first Prom that I really got stuck into was Prom 4, in which John Adams conducted the combined orchestras of the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard school. It culminated in a performance of Adams’s City Noir, his 2009 symphonic canvas that explores the sultry atmosphere of the Californian film noir genre. Adams presented it with the LSO a few years back and then, as now, I found it a slightly rambling and insufficiently varied romp through the very post-minimalist style into which the composer has settled. It still has a cracking ending, though.

I made it to the arena for Prom 5, to hear the BBC Philharmonic and Juanjo Mena bringing refined lyricism to Struass’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. It featured the British premiere of Leterna magica, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, but her fifteen minute tribute to Ingmar Bergman paled in comparison to the masterpieces of orchestral writing with which it sat. I fear, though, that the concert will be remembered for Anne Schwanewilms’s performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Her poor form was pretty astonishing and it later emerged that she was feeling ill. Certainly, there’s little point sticking the boot into her already much discussed problems, but if she knew she was ill, why not withdraw and save it for another day?

Sakari Oramo took to the podium for Prom 6 (replacing Jiri Belohlavek) with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The programme concluded with an outing for Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, one of the composer’s most significant works and a piece that seems to grow and grow in stature each time I hear it. Oramo’s view was brighter than some, making less of the sombre tone that got Prokofiev into trouble with the Soviet authorities. But Prokofiev’s balletic colours shone brilliantly and the sting in the tail cast a long shadow over what had gone before.

Devil’s Trill will be away for week 2, which continues Daniel Barenboim’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies with the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. So you’ll have to let me know if you enjoyed all of the Boulez with which they’re coupled, or whether the whole things feels like a series of barbed wire sandwiches. Enjoy.

Proms week 4: Early Mahler and Scandinavian symphonies

Great art challenges our certainties like little else.  It's part of the deal: we enter the concert hall, or the gallery or cinema for that matter, in the hope of emerging changed by what we've witnessed.  For once, though, in our safe and comfortable city, events outside of the hall seemed determined to challenge what we took for granted.

With a horrible irony that would become apparent only once the news of widespread rioting had sunk in, we stood gripped by the effervescent display of Nielsen's Inextinguishable Symphony, last on the bill for Prom 33 (Oramo/RSPO/Ott - Sibelius/Grieg/Nielsen - 9th August).  As Andris Nelsons's whirlwind romance with the CBSO continues unabated, more people seem happy to cast doubt on Sakari Oramo's decade long tenure at the head of the Birmingham orchestra but there was nothing so equivocal about Oramao's Nielsen with his new band, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.  Their Inextinguishable was propulsive and virtuosic, while their Sibelius 6th, which opened the concert, had been a warm vision of abundant nature and its eventual decline.  Only the orchestra and conductor's accompaniment of Alice Sara Ott's performance of Grieg's Piano Concerto seemed to miss the mark, smothering her precise and ardent reading in an anaesthetising blanket.

As we retreated home with news flooding in via smartphones on Monday evening, Sunday seemed a distant and more innocent time.  Heavy rain and a leaking room meant I missed hearing Prom 32 (Gardner/BBCSO/Tetzlaff - Brahms/Mahler - 8th August) in the hall, making do with the radio instead.  Mahler's fairy tale cantata Das klagende Lied, heard in its original three part form, must have surprised any casual Mahler fans energised into hearing more after the Simon Bolivar Orchestra's Friday Resurrection.  Shades and intimations of mature Mahler haunt its pages, but never his familiar grip on the bigger picture and Mahler newbies might reasonably have wondered what they'd let themselves in for during its 65 minute span.  Others more familiar with the work have suggested that it wasn't helped by the Edward Gardner's direction, but I for one found my mind wandering elsewhere.

There could be no risk of inattenetiveness in Christian Tetzlaff's vigorous and slightly scary performance of Brahms's Violin Concerto, though.  Tetzlaff exploded out of the starting blocks and barely let up from then on, producing one of the swiftest renditions of the concerto that I've heard.  It was frantic and strangely riveting stuff, grabbing us by the scruff of the neck with Tetzlaff's penetrating and brittle tone driving home the point.  All the wildness got a bit much in the last movement, though, with Tezlaff sounding increasingly ragged as he flew to the finish.