This
curious programme inaugurated Roy Goodman’s
appointment as the ECO’s Principal Guest Conductor:
as the orchestra’s Artistic Director remarks,
it demonstrates his very broad vision of music
– it also shows a most pleasing desire to
‘educate’ the audience, in the nicest way
possible, not only through showing the connections
between works but providing brief but informative
introductions to them. Given the title one
might perhaps have expected Britten’s realization
of the lovely Purcell piece, ‘Fairest Isle,
All Isles Excelling’ to have begun the proceedings,
but that place was taken by a lively rendition
of Mendelssohn’s ‘The Hebrides’ performed
from the new Urtext edition, edited by Christopher
Hogwood: it was full of little touches which
brought this over-familiar work to new life.
Tavener’s ‘Syvati’ followed: this setting
of a Slavonic prayer used in Russian Orthodox
funeral services was about five minutes too
long for me, but the solo ‘cello (played with
exquisite lugubriousness by Josephine Knight)
intended to represent ‘the Priest or Ikon
of Christ’ has some lovely phrases.
Britten’s
‘Nocturne’ is not as often performed as his
earlier ‘cycles’ – perhaps it is too Mahlerian
for some, or perhaps it is, as the composer
himself suggested, too strange and remote,
but given the right musicians it makes as
powerful an impact as any of his vocal music.
John Mark Ainsley is the ideal Britten interpreter,
with a sensitivity to the text and an innate
musicality which result in performances which
are poetic without being overblown, dramatic
without being overstated. I thought him a
little reticent in the opening lines of ‘On
a poet’s lips I slept’ and there were a few
moments during ‘What is more gentle than a
wind in summer?’ when the voice / flute /
clarinet balance was not quite right, but
otherwise this was beautifully nuanced, technically
assured singing: high points were the crystalline
diction at ‘Lest aught she be disturbed, or
grieved at all’ and the whole of ‘When most
I wink,’ where both singer and instrumental
soloists allowed us to hear the emotional
complexity of Shakespeare’s sonnet and the
facets of its ambiguity which Britten so finely
draws out.
Shakespeare
was again the inspiration after the interval
when the Tallis Chamber Choir performed Vaughan
Williams’ Serenade to Music’ with an especially
fine soprano solo – a lovely silvery voice,
very distinctive and sweet, but sadly the
lady was not credited in the programme. The
choir finely evoked the disdain of the poet
for ‘The man that hath no music in himself’
as well as the ‘sweet harmony’ of the closing
portrait of the moon. A less obvious connection
with Britain was shown in Haydn’s ‘Oxford’
Symphony, no. 92: the composer visited Oxford
in 1791 to receive an honorary D.Mus. and
conducted this symphony in the Sheldonian
to mark the occasion: it had, however, been
composed in Paris and Bavaria. No matter:
it’s one of those works which, each time one
hears it, reminds one yet again how under-rated
Haydn’s later symphonies often are. Goodman
and the ECO gave it a performance of real
commitment and style, the sprightly Allegro
full of sparkle and the Ländler – like
Minuet lively but never coarse. The second
movement, the lovely Adagio, is one of Haydn’s
most beautiful, and the orchestra drew out
all the sweetness of that wonderful D major
melody.
A very
well planned, devotedly delivered concert,
received with rapt attention and enthusiasm
by a large but not capacity audience, with
critics noticeably thin on the ground – the
usual lack of a glamorous aura to surround
this kind of music / performers, one supposes:
but then the so-glamorous Andreas Scholl the
other week, although he attracted hordes of
hacks in terms of the press list, seems only
to have been noticed by a couple of them…
Melanie Eskenazi
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