Some concerts, like this London Philharmonic Orchestra offering, unfold a naturally compelling narrative challenging the listener to embark on a voyage of inner discovery. Would that we had more of them!
Osmo Vänskä started his final traversal of his compatriot’s sound-world with the tone poem that Sibelius – notoriously reluctant to accept commissions – wrote for an American festival just before the outbreak of World War I. This had already undergone a metamorphosis from a three-movement suite, and from its original key of D flat major – technically challenging for all string players – to a more compact form and the more comfortable key of D major. Originally given the Finnish title Aallottaret (nymphs of the waves), it then developed a German identity (Rondeau der Wellen) before finally emerging as a direct tribute to Greek mythology. Oceanus was the great river that circled the earth and thus his manifold daughters became The Oceanides. The wave-like sequences for strings that ripple through the entire piece, suggesting an organic flow of the life-force itself, set the scene for what was to follow in the second half. Vänskä’s shaping hand was evident from the start, each contribution from wind, brass and percussion together with the two harps adding daubs of pastel colour to what is in effect a near cousin to Debussy’s La Mer. But only Sibelius was able to convey such a vista of raw elemental power emerging from icy depths in a fading northern light, the huge surge of sound at the climax despatched with great eloquence by the LPO strings and the thunderous timpani.
A few decades later, on the eve of yet another world war, William Walton received a commission from the greatest fiddler of his age, Jascha Heifetz. At the time he was wrestling with a self-imposed choice between becoming either a film composer or what he himself termed “a real composer”. In a villa high above Ravello on the Amalfi coast, and in a garden that was, as Susana Walton later recalled in her memoir, rich with the fragrance of myrtle, sage and thyme, Walton created a sound-world that spoke seductively both of the balmy night air and the languorous heat-haze of a Mediterranean landscape. Nothing could have provided a stronger contrast to the opening work or indeed the two symphonies in the second half. Tasmin Little didn’t just play the Walton violin concerto; she inhabited it. She took all the time in the world to voice the opening melody sognando, as indicated by the composer, and to explore with deeply expressive playing the rhapsodic qualities of a piece that eschews bravura for its own sake. This first movement is full of intimate, chamber-like music, with contributions from many individual instruments, all bathed in a mood of gentle tranquillity. Later, the contrasts between such delicacies and the vigorous interjections from the full orchestra were occasionally overstated by Vänskä.