Big fanfare harmonies from the brass, then up and away with the full-throated chorus singing “Behold, the sea”: the opening of Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony is always a knockout. So it was in Sakari Oramo’s all-British BBC Symphony Orchestra programme, the kind of concert that their fondly remembered former conductor Andrew Davis loved. But its maritime thrill, for me at least, paled beside the emotions stirred during the London premiere of Oliver Knussen’s Cleveland Pictures. Was I really hearing the opening bars of this almost mythical work by the much-missed composer, begun in 2003 and still unfinished at his untimely death in 2018?
The first of its seven planned movements, all inspired by items in the Cleveland Museum of Art, conjured up Rodin’s statue The Thinker from a wondrous mix of gnarled brass chords, rippling harps and tonalities lost and found. Knussen’s microscopic flair for instrumental detail showed more strongly still in his Velázquez portrait (fast and spiky), in the Gauguin fragment, and the sparkling, ticking movement suggesting two Fabergé and Tiffany clocks — the section closest to the early-20th-century sound world of Stravinsky and Ravel that always seemed Knussen’s home base. The chief frustration of this brilliantly despatched performance was the curtailed depiction of Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Parliament, too brief to have the ballast and fiery impact required.
Another posthumous airing followed with Britten’s early Double Concerto, finally premiered in 1997, 21 years after his death. The violinist Vilde Frang and the viola player Lawrence Power scurried through its fast sections with infectious verve, and didn’t relax much in the central movement, marked “Rhapsody”. Heard with hindsight, Britten’s youthful creation seems the result of a day at the musical clothing store, trying out different fashions. Brilliant in a precocious way, it’s certainly worth an occasional hearing, and Oramo’s forces did the work proud.
With the singers Silja Aalto and Morgan Pearse, and the lusty BBC Symphony Chorus, they did the same with Vaughan Williams’s symphony, though I must admit I emerged from the deluge of notes and Walt Whitman’s verse feeling wet, battered and very grateful for dry land.
★★★★☆
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on June 11
Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
