Sakari Oramo has been a very good friend to British music since he took up his Chief Conductor post at the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2013 and this concert was another demonstration of this friendship with three varied works from the middle of the 20th century.
Vaughan Williams had been going through a relatively fallow period of composition from 1936 and it was only in 1938, when he fell in love with Ursula Wood who would become his second wife, that a new vein of gold began to flourish. This period produced beautiful works such as the Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, the first sketches of the Fifth Symphony and the Serenade to Music, one of the most perfect of Shakespeare settings. Usually hard to gather the 16 soloists required, it is often performed in the alternative version for orchestra alone or with chorus, but here the solution was ideal, with the BBC Singers taking on the solo roles. This worked a treat with solo parts finely projected and choral sections more integrated than usual. Oramo chose tempi that were spot on and BBCSO produced a seductive halo of sound.
Doreen Carwithen has, until recent years, been virtually ignored by the musical establishment. During the latter years of her life she devoted much of her time in promoting the compositions of her husband William Alwyn, who remains, despite her efforts, grossly neglected. So it was an important event to have the chance to hear her early Concerto for Piano and Strings. Performed with energy by the enterprising Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu, it is a work of promise rather than a fully mature work. Lacking melodic or harmonic distinctiveness, it was most convincing in the Lento, which is more personal and the thematic material saltier and more heartfelt. The finale has some genuinely extrovert moments, but one felt it was nevertheless in the shadow of the John Ireland and even her husband’s two wonderful woefully neglected concertos.
Malcolm Arnold’s nine symphonies represent the finest of British symphonies, only surpassed by the Vaughan Williams, yet when was the last time any of them have been performed by a major orchestra in London? Oramo is a great admirer of the Fifth, which he also performed at the BBC Proms in 2021. This performance in the Barbican was more brilliant than in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall. The dry acoustic brought into focus the razor-sharp accuracy of the orchestration with every effect making its mark. The fragmentary collage of the Tempestuoso opening has a logic and inevitability that Oramo completely got, its disconcertingly extreme shifts of mood, reflecting the composer’s fragile mental state.
The slow movement is one of Arnold’s finest achievements, melodically rich and deeply felt. The BBCSO were at their most effortlessly virtuosic in the Scherzo, which has shards of themes avoiding each other in a wild dance with no rhythmic centre. The devastating finale is also a tour de force for the orchestra, with its fife and drum main theme increasingly subsumed into denser polyphony, erupting into a apparently victorious return to the main theme of the Lento, but imploding into nothingness in the last bars. Oramo and the orchestra clearly relished the challenges and orchestral fireworks, the brass particularly taking stage (Arnold played the trumpet professionally) and the woodwind were gloriously unanimous.
