With Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the top of their game, this concert was a breath of Scandinavian fresh air and clear light on a dark December evening. Nielsen’s late orchestral work, An Imaginary Journey to the Faroe Islands, is a true rarity, an eccentric mix of marine tone painting, sharply juxtaposed with hymn-like tunes and wild folk dance music, all held together in a way that only Nielsen could achieve. Oramo brought out the strange Viking poetry in the piece.
The UK premiere of Tebogo Monnakgotla’s violin concerto Globe Skimmer Surfing the Somali Jet, introduced most people in the audience, to a fresh lyrical Swedish voice. The work takes its starting point from a strange natural event, the mass migration of dragonflies across hundreds of miles of the China Sea. The soloist, an inspired Johan Dalene, depicted the darting flapping of wings and windswept floating with a rich mix of gratefully written melodic material. The interplay with the shimmering and evocative orchestra at times reminded one of Szymanowski. The impressionistic affects were skilfully put together, hitting their attractive marks with apparent ease. The final ecstatic section, evoked a sense of awe and mystery beyond the purely illustrative. A very fine performance all round, of a work that deserves repeated hearings. Dalene then gave a generous encore of Kreisler's Recitative and Scherzo-Caprice, delivered with aplomb.
Oramo found his home territory with the final two items on the programme, Sibelius’ Sixth and Seventh Symphonies. It’s a rare event to hear both works in the same concert, but even rarer to hear them played continuously. The effect was interesting, as it seemed to create a satisfying single work, which almost took on Mahlerian proportions. In performance, the Sixth – the most subtle and ambivalent of in the cycle – needs to be allowed to unfold on its own terms, developing a sense of inevitability. Oramo’s grasp of the unusual structure and mood swings of the work is second to none, like a warm knife cutting through butter. Each of the four movements generated their own rarefied atmosphere, leading naturally to the mysterious equivocal final cadence. The BBCSO followed Oramo’s lead at every turn, responding with admirable flexibility of tone, particularly the strings – light and lithe one minute, rich and intense the next.
There is more call for richness of tone in the Seventh, which was composed alongside the Sixth, but its mood is more straightforwardly heroic. The 20-minute single movement structure is much more than the sum of its parts and the composer felt it was the distillation of everything he had been striving to achieve in his symphonies. Oramo allowed the music to speak for itself, as he did with the Sixth, never imposing his own musical ego on proceedings. What came through was the nobility of the conception, held together by the three beautiful C major trombone solos, played with rich rounded tone by Helen Vollam, culminating in one of the most powerful, striving C major cadences in all music.
