As recording projects go, the latest by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra – of neglected violin concertos by 20th-century American composers – might just find the greatest currency. Hearing the works in concert was a good gauge of how receptive an audience is to unfamiliar music. On the cards was the Violin Concerto by American composer Robert Russell Bennett (not to be confused with Richard Rodney Bennett), a name best known as the arranger of countless Broadway musicals.
Bennett’s Violin Concerto (1941) in four movements was written for Louis Kaufman, whose 1956 live radio performance with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bernard Herrmann remains its only recording. That will be history with British violinist Chloe Hanslip’s new recording with the SSO conducted by former Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Litton. What does the work sound like, and is it worth reviving?
Its neglect might have to do with a musical idiom straddling the dead man’s land between serious and light concert music. This notion sounds snooty and prejudiced in these enlightened times, but what does one make of its opening, which sounded like an outtake from Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride, with a string melody riding on a ringing ostinato? The solo violin’s entry – confidently handled by Hanslip – showed serious intent as a neo-Romantic narrative began to take root. As the ears acclimatised to an accessible 20th-century idiom hinting of Milhaud (his South American phase) and Prokofiev (in one of his better moods), snazzy brass and percussion interjections would regularly remind the listener of its showbiz origins. While levity was a constant, solo calisthenics for violin culminated in a good old-fashioned virtuosic cadenza.
The slow movement opened with lush violas and cellos, a lyrical wallow that had a faster central interlude in the form of a whimsical dance. All this cries film music, continuing into the very brief Scherzo-like third movement, sounding as if John Williams had scored a frenetic chase through the alleys of Harlem. Its minute-and-a-half was the perfect prelude to the finale’s moto perpetuo, reminiscent of the equally fraught finale of Samuel Barber’s violin concerto. Hanslip and the orchestra made the best possible case for the concerto in this Asian premiere, and the audience eagerly concurred. One awaits next week’s modern premiere of the 1943 Violin Concerto by Vladimir Dukelsky (aka Vernon Duke).
Far more familiar fare occupied the concert’s second half with Tchaikovsky’s warhorse Symphony no. 4 in F minor. From its opening Fate motif, brilliantly nailed by the brass, one knew this was going to be a riveting performance from start to finish. Litton is an old hand in this repertoire, his Bournemouth recording from the late-1980s being any indication. Guiding its ebb and flow with unerring control, the development was thrilling and the return of the Fate motif delivered with devastating effect.
Principal oboe Rachel Walker’s plaint in the slow movement was a thing of beauty, while massed pizzicatos of the Scherzo could not have sounded more incisive. The woodwinds were equally trenchant, with Roberto Alvarez’s piercing piccolo a standout before the brass weighed in with their bluster. The finale followed attacca, with a hell-for-leather ride being the just outcome. If there has been a more absorbing or exciting account of this symphony from the SSO, I have yet to encounter it.
