Billed as “Oramo conducts Mahler's Tenth and The Lark Ascending”, at the heart of this BBC Symphony Orchestra programme lay the late Kaija Saariaho’s final concerto HUSH, an astonishing four-movement work written on her own “journey to silence” over her long battle with brain cancer. Under the care of Saariaho’s friends – conductor Sakari Oramo and trumpeter Verneri Pohjola, for whom the piece was written – the concerto showcased her trademark rich polyphonies in a wild and poignant odyssey that surely marks Pohjola as one of the most exciting soloists performing today.
The evening tied through themes of loss, finality and transcendence in a poignant tribute to the late composer. Opening with the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Symphony no. 10, the BBCSO treated each work with care and imagination. Pulled together from Mahler’s scrawls written at a time of crisis – he had just learned of his beloved wife Alma’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius and was soon to succumb to a fatal heart condition – the Adagio rose from the dramatic and eerie convulsions to the warmth of its conclusion back in the major key. The orchestra was on fine form under Oramo, showing tight dynamic control and precision while also allowing Mahler’s turbulent phrasing to shine through.
The symphony gave way to Vaughan Williams’ Toward the Unknown Region, a choral curio performed with the BBC Symphony Chorus. Vaughan Williams’ first significant choral work, inspired by words of Walt Whitman and the mysticism of William Blake, the piece allowed for both funereal dark tones as the chorus contemplated the “unknown region” of death and a sumptuous wall of triumphalism that there would be no “bounds bounding us” as a glorious finale. The orchestra and chorus were pacy, never lagging, although at times diction was lost.
HUSH begins with an immaculate stillness, punctured by the thinly wavering, unsteady wails of Pohjola’s trumpet moving from the lower to the higher register. It became evident very quickly that Pohjola has a total and unconventional mastery of the trumpet. At times his notes were breathy, frail and unsettling, barely there as he called “hush” in the first movement Let the thin air sing and the final Ink the silence. At times he moved through crashing jazz glissandos to the rumbling depths of his instrument’s lower growl. We were told in a programme note by the composer that the second movement Dream of falling was workshopped with Pohjola, improvising on the idea of a sound falling down the sides of a well: it was evocative, dreamlike and perturbing.
Yet it was in the third movement What ails you? that Saariaho and Pohjola fully showed his range of techniques, with vivid effect. Against the backdrop of incessant percussive rhythms evoking the sound of scanning MRI machines, Pohjola alternated anguished vocal howls with blasts on his instrument, bringing the movement to a claustrophobic crescendo of pain.
In the final bars, Saariaho returns to the tentative uncertainty of the first movement, fading into a loaded and (at Oramo’s request) applause-less silence, before solo violinist Igor Yuzefovich launched the ethereal opening strains of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. The masterful segue from Saariaho’s dream landscape to the pastoral romance of Vaughan Williams’ songbird ended the evening on a note of elegiac sweetness, with the theme of transcendence a moving memorial to Saariaho’s life.
