Music of mesmerising stillness in Berkeley’s elegy for his late wife
BBC NOW/Van Steen Royal Albert Hall
Michael Berkeley may reach his widest audience these days as a broadcaster with BBC Radio 3’s long-running Private Passions series, but he has an even longer record of big premieres at the Proms. Commissioned by the BBC, his latest is a Violin Concerto full of personal meaning: subtitled “In memoriam DR”, it commemorates his late wife, the literary agent Deborah Rogers, who died in 2014.
The score’s centrepiece, dominating the second of its three inter-connected movements, is an orchestral revisiting of At a Solemn Wake, which Berkeley wrote for cello and piano soon after Rogers’s death. Its elegiac, almost sentimental tone sets it apart from other material here, and it was hauntingly played by the amicable soloist, Chloë Hanslip. This not a double concerto, though, as another soloist shares the billing, since a prominent part for the tabla (performed by Diego Espinosa Cruz González) reflects Berkeley’s growing fondness for Indian music and dance.
At its best, Berkeley’s music is satisfyingly elusive, English in tone yet hard to pin down as such. In the first movement, the violin occasionally leans towards the rhapsodic musings of A Lark Ascending, but it is mostly austere. A percussive summons — tabla briefly answering orchestral percussion — introduces the violin in music of mesmerising stillness, where slightly bendy tone gives a suggestion of wailing. But even the section marked “Agitated” is unsettled rather than angry.
Jac van Steen, no stranger to Berkeley’s music, held all these elements in balance in his conducting of the soloists and BBC National Orchestra of Wales. One further element appears in the finale, where with the soloist’s switch to electric violin (inspired by Nigel Kennedy’s tribute to Jimmy Hendrix), the music seems to set off in another direction, only to be brought back into the fold at the last minute with a return to acoustic violin. Does it all add up? In such a personal work, I am not sure that it needs to. Different sorts of dance shaped the rest of the concert, framed as it was by two ballet scores. Dukas’s La Péri, commissioned by the Ballets Russes, inspired a performance of languid, shimmering warmth from van Steen and the orchestra. Showing all too brutally what happened to that tradition after the Russian Revolution was a lumbering tour through excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet: a tendency to vulgarise things here only underlined the music’s Stalinist aesthetics.