An electrifying return to concert-hall normality
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
★★★★
‘We must never go back to normal,” has been the battle cry of some in the classical music world since the pandemic started to ease. According to them, everything must be rethought: concert formats, venues, programmes, you name it.
Well, on Wednesday night I attended what some would disparage as a “normal” orchestral concert, and I am pleased to report it was wonderful. The event followed the time-honoured format: a short opener, a concerto, a symphony. Conductor and soloist came and went; people clapped; nothing remotely radical happened. And yet at a deep level it felt different. There was an electricity in the air, and the applause was more than usually thunderous. The reason isn’t hard to find. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s loyal audience were starved of music for so long, and now they are so thrilled to be back.
But it wasn’t just the resumption of a cherished cultural habit. The musicmaking was electrifying, and much of the credit for that must go to the energised figure on the podium. This was Mark Wigglesworth, one-time music director of English National Opera, at his inaugural concert as the orchestra’s chief guest conductor. He and the orchestra launched the evening with a fascinating rarity, an orchestral arrangement of the singlemovement piano quartet composed by the 16-year-old Gustav Mahler.
David Matthews, the neo-romantic English composer who made the arrangement, had no qualms about fixing some of Mahler’s compositional errors. The resulting orchestral sound was certainly less cluttered than the original, and it showed an almost shaman-like ability to get inside the mind of the young Mahler. Here and there, one heard uncanny echoes of the later composer, as well as hints of Dvořák and Wagner, all played with affectionate relish by the orchestra.
Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto, which came next, is often played with amusing sardonic light-fingeredness, but here it felt savage. The soloist, pianist Steven Osborne, gave the first movement’s motoric, neo-baroque roulades and spiky little melodies a demonic energy, and the orchestra and Wigglesworth responded absolutely in kind. After all that sarcasm, the tender innocence of the slow movement always comes as a shock, especially here where the dialogue between the strings and the trickling right hand of the pianist seemed more than usually intimate. After the brittle humour of the last movement, Osborne played as his encore a musing meditation on some ancient melody, possibly Scottish, in the evening’s most intimate moment.
Finally came Sibelius’s First Symphony, a piece full of full-throated, Tchaikovsky-like romanticism but with unexpected twists and turns in the narrative. Wigglesworth made the contrasts absolutely brutal, so we were left with a feeling of something blazing but enigmatic. Over the following three movements, he and the orchestra gradually unravelled the enigma, so the final plucked chord felt like the last piece in the puzzle that makes sense of everything. Only some balance problems with over-assertive brass slightly marred the experience; apart from that, it was thrilling. If this is “normal”, bring it on.