The Academy of St Martin in the Fields has had a long history of performing the string works of British composers. Michael Tippett’s glorious Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli is one of those works that has blossomed in their capable hands and did so again here. With the ideal number of performers and without a conductor in the beautiful St Martin-in-the-Fields, Tippett’s intricate polyphony was clearly projected, while there was enough heft to make a full and rich sound at the appropriate points in the score. This included the great fugal passage which builds to a passionate climax, expertly paced here and the dissolve into the famously beautiful pastoral passage was exquisitely achieved. Rightly so, this performance was a deeply emotional experience from first to last.
Anna Clyne’s mandlin concerto Three Sisters was composed for Avi Avital in 2017. It proved to a delightful mix of delicacy, genuine musicality and inspired thematic material that perfectly matched the skills of the soloist. In three movements, its opening two alternate ruminating motifs and more dramatic material, always clearly showcasing and then balancing with the diminutive volume of the solo instrument. In the highly entertaining finale, Avital was given a chance to show how virtuosic he could be with fast passages of dance-like material and an almost heavy metal attack of his eight strings. A charmer of a performance of an excellent and effective work.
The considerable skill and presence of Avital were put to great service in his own arrangement of Bach’s Violin Concerto no. 1 in G minor, BWV 1056R. Sounding like it surely should have been written for the mandolin, it was played with grace and musicality by the whole ensemble. The beautiful slow central movement was especially poignant in this arrangement and again Avital showed us his considerable technique in the lively finale.
The concert ended with an impressive account of the Sonata for String Orchestra by William Walton. Arranged from the composer's String Quartet of 1947 by Malcolm Arnold for the ASMF in 1970, it is a work that strikes many of the familiar poses from the composer’s pre-war masterpieces. However, his wartime work on film scores and his reluctance to change his musical idiom had the result of diminishing the urgency in his scores from the late 1940s onwards. Added to that, the original quartet version has a greater vulnerability and appears to be more personal than this later arrangement.
However, it’s hard to believe that this version could be given better advocacy than here. The tricky rhythms of the Scherzo were crisp and agile in their hands. The romance of the slow movement was ideally pitched and the rumbustious finale was delivered with gusto and accuracy. A rousing end to a thoroughly refreshing evening of music making in a beautiful setting.
