After her Halle debut a few weeks ago, Elena Schwarz returned to Manchester to direct the city’s other band, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, in a brilliantly balance programme, culminating in one of the most thunderous accounts of Mahler’s First Symphony I have ever heard.
The evening began with Debussy’s La Mer, where orchestral textures were translucently silken and tempos generally forward-looking. Occasionally the vivid sonic clarity seemed to cast too harsh a light on Debussy’s score, though it also revealed some striking details within the music. The sense of musical direction was never in threat, though, with Schwarz’s posture rocking from foot-to-foot with each beat mirroring the rolling of the waves. The finale gave the wind players ample opportunity to show off some remarkable control at pianissimo dynamics, before a breathless and cinematic coda.
A trombone concerto is always a special occasion, with the repertoire limited to a scattering of offerings from Rimsky-Korsakov, Leopold Mozart, Michael Haydn and, more recently, Sir James MacMillan. Dani Howard’s concerto, her first effort in the genre, was written during the pandemic in reference to the every-day acts of quiet heroism of waste collector, bus drivers and the like. Its three movements, titled Realisation, Rumination and Illumination offer three quite different sound worlds in which the soloist can be both meditator and acrobat. The glisteningly bright bustle of the first saw soloist Peter Moore pull off all the requisite fireworks, while also interacting sensitively with his two orchestral colleagues at the back of the stage. This intriguing dialogue continued in the second movement, where the warm beauty of Moore’s tone was a wonder to behold among the cosmic orchestral soundscape. The finale proved a rollicking tour de force, Moore rising to the challenges of the writing with some remarkable displays of virtuosity.
After a breather, Schwarz’s reading of Mahler 1 proved to be breathtakingly dramatic. The first movement’s opening theme eased in gently before steadily growing in warmth and life, the high-resolution bustle of the development passage setting up a brilliantly giddy coda. The Ländler, taken up with barely a pause for breath, continued in much the same vein, positively zipping along at a heady tempo and with enormous muscularity in the low string and brass playing. At times it felt a little like being bludgeoned around the head, and the dizzying tempo was probably a stretch for a Ländler, but in capturing the swagger of this youthful symphony, Schwarz was entirely successful. After Ronan Dunne’s exquisitely vulnerable double bass solo in the third movement, the finale erupted again with the same wild energy which had characterised the first half of the symphony. Schwarz maintained an unwavering sense of structure, reaching ever high gears of vivacity as the last minutes thundered to their close.
Various promotional references to the words “Titan” and “Titanic” for this concert seemed to have bemused at least one concertgoer, who appeared to discover at about 7.25pm that this would not be a live-with-orchestra account of the 1997 James Cameron film, but this was music-making at its most cinematic. More encouraging was the large number of primary school age children who sat in rapt attention to this most eclectic of programmes.
