A glance at the programme for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Wednesday matinee suggested one thing: light music. Yet the opposite – both darkness and heaviness – made its presence felt throughout.
Not so much in the amuse-bouche that is Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto. That term is entirely appropriate, as soloist Nikolaj Henriques articulated his role with such playfulness he caused flurries of laughter among the audience. Showing sensitivity to the instrument, Fabien Gabel kept the CBSO in accompanying mode, enabling Henriques to be heard with complete clarity. However, this playing down of the orchestra only added to the tone of cheekiness, as if the players were mischievously mucking about in the background. Henriques’ strength here was treating the pulse as if it were elastic, lingering on melodic shapes before tumbling back into tempo.
The rest of the concert demonstrated a more marked juxtaposition of contrasting moods, which found themselves embodied in Gabel’s body language. Eschewing a baton for most of the evening, he was by turns flamboyant, with broad arm sweeps, then meticulous and intricate, all about his fingers, and also bullish, both fists punching the air. The CBSO could hardly have mirrored these gestures more closely in Mark Simpson’s new Concertino for trumpet and orchestra, receiving its UK premiere. Though nominally having a fast-slow-fast-slow structure, Simpson makes each movement follow a nicely unpredictable trajectory. The surprisingly short opener was so dramatic in medias res doesn’t cover it; it was like being hurled into the melee of a hectic denouement. While the orchestra straightened itself out into a clear, driving pulse, Jason Lewis’ trumpet, frantic from the outset, became like a tuned machine gun.
In the work’s slower material, Simpson introduces glitter and lushness, and just a hint of sugar, though Lewis wasn’t interested in milking it, if anything directing things away back to briskness. These days, the CBSO sounds superb in sumptuous material like this, alloyed here with some beautifully-judged weight from the lower strings, while the trumpet flitted between floridity and touches of lyricism. More mixed moods permeated the latter two movements. The third found its pace militated against by circularity, its pulse filled with irregularities, with Lewis’ trumpet providing a focal point, leading forward. In the final movement more touches of glamour were undermined by a palpable uncertainty in the way the upper strings hovered. These doubts were justified in a looming orchestral sequence driven along by pulse and tune, eventually taking us to the prospect of a resolution that never quite came.
The most telling juxtapositions – tantamount to mixed messages – came in Mozart’s Idomeneo ballet music and Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. In the Mozart, Gabel struck a clear balance between playful, grandiose and elegant, swinging wildly through the assorted stylistic volte-faces that make up this strange but irresistible music. This was especially effective in the central Passepied, with tilting light and shade as its tonality shifted between major and minor.
But it was in the Shostakovich that the moods being conveyed became not merely contrasting but opposite. Very deliberately, Gabel adopted a polarised approach on the podium. One pole was militaristic precision, forcing everything, despite its ostensible froth and frivolity, into a tight metric grid. This made the more rambunctious material either ridiculous, akin to circus music, or grotesque, the players becoming puppets on strings forced to dance. This became a deliriously powerful danse macabre at the end, Gabel taking it absurdly fast. The other pole was all shadows and nuance, occupying a kind of space between worlds, outside time. Here was a refuge where doleful laments were allowed to speak, and where Shostakovich’s terrible truths could finally be heard.
