Things were not all that they seemed at Wednesday's City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert. For their season finale, they had brought out the big hitters, in the form of Britten and Elgar. Yet in both cases, the concert served to demonstrate how expectations can be consistently challenged. Not, though, in the concert opener, Dani Howard’s The Butterfly Effect. Its ten interminable minutes of reheated clichés were indistinguishable from the slick, soulless underscore of a corporate promotional video. Even its occasional prettiness sounded contrived, the product of a committee rather than anything approximating a muse.
Enter Ian Bostridge, who alongside Elspeth Dutch, immediately escorted us in an altogether more arresting and imaginative sound world of Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. Kazuki Yamada and the CBSO established a supporting atmosphere that seemed semi-static, caught between movement and stillness. This bestowed on the Pastoral a balmy sleepiness, while the Nocturne kept fizzing with solo intensity before dissolving into mystery, bobbing between the two like a raisin in champagne.
It was now that everything became undermined. Dutch and Bostridge became like heralds in the Elegy, only for everything to subtly transform, rendering them forlorn, almost drowning in the strings’ ostensibly gentle, undulating waves. The Dirge was stunning, Bostridge embodying the music’s unsettling mix of jauntiness and macabre, to the extent that if he had been dressed in a robe and held a scythe no-one would have been remotely surprised. All of which made the work’s conclusion more disquieting, through a disarmingly swift and upbeat Hymn and into the closing Sonnet which was superbly indefinable: transcendence, or the opposite? Encapsulating the work’s ambiguities, this impassioned valediction, and the closing Epilogue, became music beyond light or shade, sounding out from somewhere ‘other’.
The transformation in Elgar’s First Symphony comes early on, as its peculiarly plodding opening idea – from today’s perspective, so instantly indicative of all things Elgarian – is abruptly cast aside after a couple of minutes as we’re hurled into a whirlwind of fervid, even frenzied creativity. Equally sudden is its shift from such ebullience into its lyrical subject, which Yamada filled with elegance, before expanding into powerful, volatile waters, whereupon that unassuming opening idea resurfaces. This is surely one of the most disorienting of all symphonic openings – as if Elgar had deliberately picked three ideas guaranteed not to gel, and then explored the ensuing chaos – yet Yamada consistently made this an exhilarating virtue of all that came after.
Certainly, there was not a hint of chaos. Elegance punctured swagger-like shafts of sunlight through thunderclouds (appropriate considering the current weather), beauty was mercilessly swept aside in a maelstrom of ferocity, the work’s ideas permeating each other in a superbly capricious display that never sounded calculated but entirely organic, spontaneous, and structurally fluid. Yamada – surprisingly measured on the podium (eschewing his usual Bernstein-like tendency to gyrate) yet eliciting an enormous response from the CBSO – went even further in the second movement, invoking Mahler in its impish grotesquerie, before again thwarting our expectations, shifting into slithery gracefulness. Here was the same mercurial tension as in the Britten, the unfolding of a music that presented its ideas clearly yet juxtaposed and developed them in wholly unpredictable ways.
The CBSO brought great calm to the searching sensibility of the Adagio, sounding like the musical equivalent of golden hour, even hinting at Nimrod in its hushed ending, before a startling finale that improbably managed to combing sedate sauntering with an absolute romp. That seemingly plodding opening idea became an earworm, continually reconfiguring itself and protruding through the momentum, while Yamada – seemingly against the odds – somehow maintained coherence right until its breathless end.
