Two weeks prior to this concert I reviewed another
CBSO concert with another American guest conductor, Robert Spano. Spano
had usefully illustrated the second half performance of Ives’s Symphony
No. 2 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus singing selected
American songs and hymns that feature prominently in the work. In the
same way Marin Alsop prefaced the performances of Vaughan Williams’
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and James MacMillan’s percussion
concerto, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel that occupied the first half of
this concert with the girls of the City of Birmingham Symphony Youth
Chorus singing the third mode melody that Tallis wrote for Archbishop
Parker’s Psalter and which inspired Vaughan Williams to write his first
true masterpiece, together with the French Advent plainsong Veni,
Veni, Emanuel.
Consequently the first note of the concert was the
pure, unaccompanied sound of a single girl’s voice floating Tallis’s
haunting melody around an expectant Symphony Hall, a daunting and nerve
jangling experience for the young choir member that she took admirably
in her stride. With the melody firmly focused in the mind Alsop immediately
slipped into Vaughan Williams’s response, the hushed initial entry in
the upper strings beautifully atmospheric. Alsop’s attention to phrasing
and the delicate nuances of the dynamics became clear early on although
her decision to place the string quartet off stage created an unease
in the balance that I found somewhat unsettling, the sound from off
stage being just too distant, the effect ultimately over exaggerated.
It was largely for this reason that I found the performance overall
to be lacking the sense of rapture that would have made it truly memorable,
although it should be said that the players of the CBSO strings certainly
played beautifully, in particular the violin and viola solos of Jacqueline
Hartley and Christopher Yates, both of which had a wonderful aura of
freedom about them, surely the feeling of Vaughan Williams himself revelling
in the freedom of his newfound soundworld.
The success of James MacMillan’s percussion concerto,
Veni, Veni Emmanuel, is no secret, yet when one considers that
this was its milestone three hundredth performance it begins to put
that success into its true context, a quite remarkable feat. Listening
to the work live it is no surprise that the concerto has proved so popular.
The ingredients of a haunting melody that everyone knows, set in a contemporary
idiom and an unlikely one at that with a host of percussion instruments
as the centrepiece, wrapped up in some stunningly inventive and imaginative
writing that is, in its best moments, utterly spellbinding, as was this
performance by Colin Currie. It is of course a visual as well as an
aural experience and this was clearly not lost on Currie, who recorded
the work for Naxos a couple of years ago after Evelyn Glennie’s earlier
post premiere recording, Glennie being the work’s dedicatee. The physical
energy of Currie’s performance was extraordinary and perhaps all the
more so for the fact that the composer was in the audience to celebrate
the special occasion. The contribution of the orchestra was equally
breathtaking and the moment towards the close where the brass quietly
appear through the chaos elsewhere in the orchestra, intoning the chords
of "O come, O come", will remain with me for a long time to
come. The performance had once again been preceded by the choir singing
the original plainsong unadorned and Alsop had also chosen to say a
few words about the work, illustrated with a handful of brief musical
examples as a useful introduction for the uninitiated. The whole experience
was such that I would have happily have gone through it again.
It would have been rather easy to have slipped into
a routinely pedestrian performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony
after the elation of the MacMillan, but Marin Alsop was not going to
fall into that trap. Far from it. This was Brahms with attitude and
it was obvious from the brisk tempo of the very opening bar that Alsop
was going to hit us between the eyes. In point of fact I happen to prefer
a fluid tempo in the opening movement although there are those for whom
later in the work it may have all become a little too much, the similarly
brisk tempo of the Allegro giocoso third movement taking on an
almost aggressive quality that had me pinned to my seat and (I confess)
smiling wryly on occasions. That said, the balance was preserved by
a delicate and thoughtfully shaped second movement, the opening finely
measured (a shame about the clipped horn note here) with sensitive woodwind
playing and some gloriously rich sounds in the recapitulation. Alsop’s
determination to drag every ounce of emotional turbulence from Brahms’s
score was evident to the last yet her ability to float the more delicate
passages was equally telling, in all a highly charged, deeply wrought,
even physical performance that left me in little doubt that Alsop is
a Brahms conductor to watch. I cannot but help wonder what she would
do with Mahler!
Christopher Thomas.
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