Magical, moving premiere in the spirit of Mahler
BBSO/Gardner
Royal Albert Hall and Radio 3
Mahler’s spirit hovered over the first half of this concert, without a note of his music being played. It was Mahler who initiated the tradition of symphonies of songs, something reinvented here for the 21st century in the premiere of Raymond Yiu’s Symphony. A BBC Proms commission from the 42-year-old Hong Kong-born, London-based composer, this new work addresses in part the Aids crisis that the world has quietly forgotten about, and sets poetry by Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Thom Gunn and John Donne.
Perhaps the most strikingly original thing about Yiu’s work is not that it is scored for countertenor and a large orchestra, but that the singer becomes protagonist. Yet just as with the recent casting of a countertenor as Oscar Wilde in an American opera about the gay hero, this seems to raise surely unintended questions of subliminal stereotyping. At least the countertenor Andrew Watts quickly laid such worries to rest, showing from the opening movement – where breathy syllables from the singer are picked up by shimmering percussion – that this music could have been written only for his voice type.
The second movement, a scurrying scherzo, is scored for orchestra alone, and features almost Mahlerian café music, which clears to reveal the reconfigured sounds of a Scarlatti sonata – a magical moment akin to the Schubert quote in Tippett’s Knot
Garden. Yiu’s magpie exuberance extends to the conjuring up of a disco shuffle in the fourth movement, complete with amplified crooning from the singer. The BBC Symphony Orchestra responded with fluidity, guided with complete control by the conductor Edward Gardner. Together with Watts, he made the John Donne finale a
moving epilogue, with its repetitions of the word “everlasting” carried on consoling music.
Britten’s most Mahlerian work, the
Sinfonia da Requiem, had provided a suitably dark opening to the concert, but the other real highlight of the evening was the first-ever Proms outing for Nielsen’s 1926 Flute Concerto. Characteristic of the composer’s late period, it balances sardonic humour with a pastoral character so quintessential to the flute, and the soloist Emily Beynon reflected both aspects as she mixed warm tone with silvery flights of virtuosity.
Gardner, soon to take up his new post with the Bergen Philharmonic, has already begun a cycle of Janáček recordings there, and he showed his mastery of the idiom in a taut and transparent performance of the composer’s Sinfonietta, another work from 1926. It’s a pity that Gardner never did Janáček operas in his decade at ENO.