The force of nature that is Dalia Stasevska rarely lacks ambition, and Friday’s programme at the Barbican with the BBC Symphony Orchestra laid out a canvas from earthly struggle to the truly cosmic. Still, the distance between intention and realization can be wide. What we ended up with was a curiosity which was something of a curate's egg.
Boris Lyatoshinsky’s 1955 symphonic ballade Grazhyna began mysteriously, but it soon moved on to a display of all the orchestral weight the BBC SO can summon. The strings were dark and luminous and the brass resplendent, but the music itself seemed weighed down by its own rhetoric. Whiffs of Wagner vied with the shadowy introspection of Josef Suk and the sudden, iron-edged bite of Shostakovich. However, the work never quite settles into an organic voice of its own. It lingers where it ought to move, straining for epic scale until the argument wears thin. Despite Stasevska’s patient shaping, its length felt unearned, a broad gesture that outlasted its welcome.
With Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, however, the hall seemed to hold its breath. There American soloist Randall Goosby gave us a performance that refused easy consolation. Where so many violinists indulge in mid-century nostalgia, bathing these melodies in unclouded sweetness, Goosby brought a lean strength and dark-grained intensity. There was a quiet gravity to his opening phrases, turning song into searching monologue. The slow movement’s long, aching oboe melody was poetic, but when it was taken up by Goosby, he was not content with passive beauty. Instead, found an austere, probing sorrow that touched something much deeper. When the perpetual-motion finale arrived, it was delivered with relentless clarity and nervous energy, Stasevska and Goosby moving as one toward an exhilarating close.
That sense of inner necessity was sorely missed in the London premiere of Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners. A setting of words by Whitman and Tennyson, contemplating the Voyager Golden Record and our place within the vastness of the universe no less, ought to evoke a sense of wonder and awe. Instead, the piece dissolved into a sequence of gentle, pastel fragments. It is undeniably pleasant music, but bitty and hesitant, unwilling to risk the sustained breadth that large ideas demand.
The word-setting, too, felt uneasy. Lines of poetry that ask for rhetorical depth were broken apart into brief, repetitive patterns, drifting along pleasantly on the surface without ever taking root. To approach the infinite through miniature forms could be an inspired oxymoron; here, it simply felt small, reducing the vastness of the cosmos into bite-size mouthfuls. I'd like to see Shaw finding a language that was more ambitious and genuinely powerful. She seems to have the magic touch with her thematic material, but is in danger of becoming trapped in a too comfortable complacency.
A disjointed evening in the end, perhaps, but memorable because of the searching, unsentimental truth of Goosby’s Barber.
