A strange evening. Just a few minutes into Strauss’ Don Juan, the opening work in this City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Thomas Søndergård, the tone of the occasion became clear. This wasn’t going to be an evening of bold, personal interpretations. No demonstration here of the clay of the score being fashioned into the sculpture of the work. This was music at face value, skin deep.
This hardly mattered in Thomas Adès’ Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, being as it is one of the composer’s many works taking the most basic ideas (typically scales) and refracting them into modestly convoluted surfaces. As such, Søndergård’s superficial approach, evidently embraced by soloist Leila Josefowicz, nicely realised the opening movement’s focus, all glisten and embellishment, wisely making no attempt to suggest there was more below the surface. Though Josefowicz’s tone had a surprising harsh edge, this made its effect akin to skittering and sliding across a large sheet of ice.
The middle movement was presented like struggling to arrange puzzle pieces, which slowly came together to form a curious kind of circular argument, sparking out notes while looping round and round. Josefowicz appeared uncertain how to present her ephemeral material, at times opting for more earnestness, putting her at odds with the orchestra, and leading to a curious result that encapsulated the work – and, perhaps, the concert – as a whole: impassioned neutrality. In this limited musical landscape, Søndergård and the CBSO latched onto the few tangible gestures whenever they could, though this tended to have the effect of making Adès’ crash-bang-wallop endings sound not just superficial, but downright cheap.
Brahms’ Symphony no. 2 in D major was the only work on the programme where the music became more than just surface. Finally we experienced a more cohesive, convincing performance that had both depth and scope to develop and transform organically. All the same, Søndergård continued to display cool, cursory detachment, such that Brahms’ unexpected structural asides and left-field moments felt like the product of compositional uncertainty or indecision. Though it wasn’t helped by some rather glaring balance issues in the orchestra (the brass kept protruding rather than blending), the second movement was genuinely beautiful, with the wind textures in particular shaped with real delicacy and grace. And where Brahms’ abrupt changes had felt wrong before, in the Allegretto grazioso they became fittingly playful. All the same, such moments of clarity as this came to feel accidental, all the more so in a finale characterised by severe dynamic and dramatic limitations. Its ending was like a reprise of the Adès: a blank, brute-force punch.
Ironically, despite its superficial delivery it was Don Juan that ended up working best. Strauss’ tone poems, following the contorted drama of their underlying narratives, are all highly episodic, so Søndergård’s chop-and-change (non-)interpretation served to delineate this clearly. Though the piece never cohered, it became fascinatingly broken down into disjunct archetypes, simultaneously acting to demonstrate, and indeed show off, the CBSO’s diverse stylistic skills. Raw, swashbuckling swagger; delicate, ethereal gleam; rich, dreamy lyricism – here was an orchestra showing the extent to which they could live up to each of these distinct musical and emotional states. The horns deserve praise for overcoming past problems of cracked notes and giving their strongest performance in recent times, tapping into a vein of pure heroics. Ultimately, while it’s perhaps impossible to admire Søndergård’s surface-level overview of the evening’s music, it did make the end of Don Juan utterly chilling. The music just stopped dead, remained silent for what felt like an age, before tilting into pure darkness.
