From start to finish, Wednesday evening’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert was filled with a constant, all-pervading restlessness. Part of this was an obvious excitement on the part of conductor Kazuki Yamada, clearly delighted to be back on the podium for the first time this year. It was an excitement evidently shared by the orchestra, who were more than usually full-blooded throughout the evening. But all three compositions exhibited similar forms of restlessness, running through their respective cores and giving rise to everything we heard.
In the case of Dai Fujikura’s Wavering World, receiving its first UK performance, this quality was etched into not only its title but its very language. The piece emerged from energetic trills and tremolos, within which traces of line could be glimpsed, some stable, others falling away. It soon became apparent that the notion of stability was actually to be found in the restless activity rather than its sustained elements, taken further in another aspect of the work, articulated via radiant chords always moving onward, also restless. Unfortunately, having established this as not remotely a nervous energy but an absolutely vital one (literally: the work’s inspiration is associated with the natural world), Fujikura ended up squandering its promise by proceeding to explore it at such length that his palette began to sound meagre, becoming monotonous and dull, its apparent urgency ultimately lacking coherent direction or focus.
There’s no way the same could be said for Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, one of the most radical conceptions in the symphonic canon, and which today sounds in many ways no less bizarre than it must have done at its 1832 premiere. Few works suffer more than this one for exaggeration, conductors and orchestra tending to greatly over-egg its contorted structures and extreme language such that it ends up sounding parodic. Not so here: though he seemed to be going through the most extreme physical workout of his life, Yamada sought to do nothing more than reveal, with complete transparency, the weirdness and wonder of the piece as it actually is.
Restlessness drove the work on, shaped by its own rhapsodic elasticity, a blur of whimsy and passion. The Ball swept grandly, the Scene in the country was more than a mere pastorale, with a palpable electricity running through it, even during its periods of spacious contemplation. This extended to the final two movements, the CBSO revelling in the sarcastic swagger of the March to the Scaffold, while rendering the Witches’ Sabbath a fabulously raucous display of unflinching grotesquerie. It’s wonderful to see Yamada establishing a consistent reputation with the CBSO for delivering such wonderfully detailed, vivid, and often overwhelming performances as this without ever making them distorted or overblown.
Though more delicate in many respects, an equivalent restlessness ran through Walton’s Violin Concerto, again manifesting as a capricious, rhapsodic instinct. Soloist Eugene Tzikindelean was untroubled by its unpredictable character, following the contour from heartfelt lyrical outpouring to rhythmically-charged outbreaks with aplomb. Indeed, the restless spirit often seemed to be emanating directly from him, the orchestra’s syncopations, scurrying and drum reports all a by-product of Tzikindelean’s unstoppable driving force.
All three movements are propelled by this, and undergo similarly wild diversions from their nominal respective tempi, such that they here merged into a single, highly variegated long-term expression of the ache and the ebullience of Walton’s new found love in Naples. Here, as in the Berlioz (and, to a lesser extent, in the Fujikura), the constant restlessness at the music’s heart proved irresistible, such that we all left Symphony Hall positively bristling with excitement.
