Do we really know what was in Beethoven’s mind when he wrote the four notes that open his Fifth Symphony and immediately command attention? And does it really matter if we don’t? Many contemporary composers now allow us access to the creative process of composition by revealing their innermost inspiration. Andrew Norman was signally influenced in his short piece Unstuck, which opened this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Sakari Oramo, by Kurt Vonnegut and one of the iconic sentences in his novel Slaughterhouse Five: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
The conceit itself is intriguing, the music equally so. It teems with energy and percussive sonorities, yet shifts quite suddenly to passages where very delicate instrumental fragments float gently in the air, disappear and then return like remembrances of things past. It was like finding a set of keys to unlock a series of padlocks. Norman’s extensive experience of writing for the video game genre prepared the ground for this orchestral joyride, in which detail almost overwhelms the listener, where as Norman himself commented, “everyone is going totally nuts or freezing in the moment”. More than the representation of chaos in the full orchestral outbursts, it was the presence of unexpected tenderness that impressed me: melancholic string cantilenas which would not be out of place in Mahler and the morendo effect at the close where the ascending theme is voiced by three cellos.
Coco Chanel once described her exact contemporary Stravinsky as having “the look of a clerk in a Chekhov short story”. His dictum that “there should be no ‘interpreters’ of my music, only ‘executants’”, on the basis of his precise all-encompassing notation, makes him out to be the perfect musical number-cruncher. Precision is everything, not least in his Violin Concerto in D major, where the famous opening chord, once thought to be unplayable, stretching from D through E to A, acts as an aide à passer to all four movements. The composer’s disdain for traditional virtuosic fiddle concertos and love of Bach, as well as the absence of a cadenza, are reflected in three of the titles – Toccata, Aria I and Aria II. And then to cap it all, there are the hi-jinks of the concluding Capriccio.
Once in a while you sense that a particular concerto fits a soloist like a glove. This was the case in Vilde Frang’s reading, the opening chord delivered with sharp inflection, the angularity of the writing fully exploited, the gurgling woodwind, spitting brass and expectorating strings often sounding like an extension to Pulcinella. In Aria II Frang’s beautifully modulated dynamics and changeant colouring underlined its operatic qualities, and her sense of fun was evident in the perpetuum mobile character of the Capriccio. The BBC SO accompanied to the manner born.
These players have recently returned from a Swiss tour in which they performed all seven symphonies by Sibelius under Oramo’s direction. Both conductor and orchestra were on fire for the first in the canon. There was nothing remotely homeopathic about this particular performance: it was iron-rich, oxygen-saturated and vodka-fortified. From the opening clarinet solo, not slow and mysterious but brisk and introductory, it had an impressive dramatic sweep to it. Oramo can certainly whip up a storm where needed, yet he was equally sensitive to those moments when all the ions in the air have dispersed, leaving clarified brilliance in the sky. With very little in the way of Nordic gloom or introspection, and not a hint of muddiness in the open and transparent textures, a high-potency, full-blooded account like this of the E minor symphony causes quite a tingle.
