Magical potency from Sakari Oramo and the BBCSO in late Romantic music

This evening of late Romantic music was a rich banquet of orchestral colour. Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were in their element in this repertoire. The Overture in D minor by the recently rediscovered Croatian composer, Dora Pejačević started proceedings with a bang. A short piece of energy and strength, with an undertow of anxiety, it is rather thickly scored. Played with zest, it proved to be an effective concert opener.

However, once you enter the sound world of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto no. 1 you are taken into another realm of sonic brilliance. In fact, hardly any other concerto has the magical potency of this single movement work. Its full majesty was revealed in this near ideal performance by Ilya Gringolts. Its difficulty lies in the balancing of delicacy and power, passion and precision. Gringolts’ range of colour and dynamics impressed at every capricious turn and Oramo marshalled the BBCSO to provide an intricate web of accompanying sound, which then at times expanded to overwhelm the soloist and the audience. 

Following this came another magical work, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, which has a unique atmosphere. Composed as a birthday gift for his wife Cosima and first performed as a surprise on Christmas Day morning 1870, it shows the composer at his most human and warm-hearted. Oramo chose to perform the work with a larger group of strings than in the score, as Wagner himself frequently did, and the added richness was effective in the context of the whole concert and didn’t detract from the work's intimacy. Beautiful playing from the woodwinds and horns circled around the full bed of string sound.

Richard Strauss’ tone poems were once the bedrock of the repertoire, but are less frequently heard now in this country, being superseded somewhat by the gargantuan symphonies of Mahler. It is no surprise that one of the most popular of them now is the equally outsized Alpine Symphony. Hearing the early tone poem Death and Transfiguration afresh, one was struck by how extraordinary it must have sound in the late 1880s. This heady mix of dark foreboding and blistering rays of optimism, clearly the work of a young man full of talent and hope, was unsurprisingly one of the composer’s favourite of his own works. Oramo didn’t shirk from giving the full panoply of orchestral colour its full due and the overwhelming climaxes were fully realised with blazing brass and, in the romantic passages, the strings were tonally lush. A very satisfying ending to a fascinating, entertaining evening of music-making.