“Three musical salutes to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was how London’s Barbican billed Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Chief Conductor Domingo Hindoyan’s debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. That was certainly a spot-on description for their opener: the UK premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s Kauyumari, a post-pandemic commission by Hindoyan’s fellow Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to celebrate their 2021 return to the stage.
Named after the Mexican Huichol people’s word for ‘blue deer’, it takes a traditional Huichol melody Ortiz first used in her 1997 string quartet Altar de Muertos and submits it to a symphonic-size gradual development intended to symbolise the annual hallucinatory, soul-healing journey into the spiritual realms that the Huichol people believe this blue deer guides them on. First intoned on the trumpet, the perkily lilting, colourfully percussioned melody revealed itself to be a cracker, playing out almost as a folky Mexican answering fanfare to Copland’s Fanfare to the Common Man which later we’d hear in his Third Symphony’s finale; and the BBC Symphony threw itself into the swing of it, pushing out Ortiz’s hairpin-crescendo barks with rhythmically sharp oomph, and each section delivering songful renditions of the ever-repeating melody as it was passed around. But while the piece and its performance were big on vim, it was light on true musical development, these repeats happening to an orchestral backing cushion that got steadily busier and louder, but not audibly, interestingly, more complex. Lasting around seven minutes, this was a score that had run its natural course after four, making Hindoyan’s smartly punchy final accelerando a treat for more than one reason.
No such construction problems with Barber’s Violin Concerto though – a work inspired by the European tradition, begun in Europe, but completed in 1939 in America after the outbreak of World War 2 had forced him home with only the first two movements done. Young American violinist Tessa Lark was the soloist, and the reading she offered was a composed, almost soberly reflective one, portamento employed rarely but with effect. Sound-wise, the concerto could have been tailor-made for her, it makes so much of the violin’s lower registers where she herself is particularly powerfully, smokily wide. Barber’s slow-movement stroke of genius, giving the violin its theme for the first time in its duskiest depths, thus filled the hall with her round warmth. The other slow movement delight was the utter sweetness and long-lined lyricism of its gently vibrato’d opening oboe solo, meaning that it felt thoroughly forgivable that this movement was also perhaps the least architecturally satisfying of the three, dragging slightly at points. The finale then unusually, satisfyingly, echoed the martial darkness Barber had just fled, sounding for once more Shostakovich of spirit than Korngold. Lark’s own relentless perpetuum mobile race meanwhile was smartly rendered, and her encore – a bluegrass nod to her own Kentucky heritage via Emily’s Reel by Mark O’Connor – enthusiastically received.
Then finally, Copland’s Third Symphony, which premiered in 1946 after a commission from Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and was intended, in Copland’s words, “to reflect the euphoric spirit of the country” as America emerged from its war years. Hindoyan and the orchestra captured all its emotionally complex sense of expressing not just where Americans were going, but where they had just been. Deeply memorable was the finale’s sparkling choral cloud of woodwind birdsong, and the glowing brass then slowly rising through it like a gentle new dawn. Also, the fabulous barely-vibrato’d strings luminosity. Magic in its quiet delicacy, magisterial in its might, it won Hindoyan the audience’s hearts.
