Time stands still as Benedetti embraces Elgar’s original genius
BBCSO/ORAMO/ Benedetti
Probably not since Nigel Kennedy has Britain had such a nationally recognisable violinist as Nicola Benedetti. That may be where their similarities end, for while Kennedy made his sensational recording debut with Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Benedetti is now embracing this great work with typical care and conscientiousness. The fast-burning flame that afflicted Kennedy, at least as far as his classical career has been concerned, is not Benedetti’s style. She clearly believes in the advice she is dispensing in her own new “With Nicky” online series of educational videos.
The Benedetti effect was certainly felt here in the Barbican, with a bigger audience than the BBC Symphony Orchestra usually enjoys on a Friday evening. Benedetti’s sense of concentration on the longest violin concerto in the standard repertoire held the hall spellbound. It is only 18 months since she introduced the Elgar to her repertoire first with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and Benedetti may yet come to a more relaxed interpretation of the piece, but this was full of febrile passion that marks Elgar out as an English contemporary of Mahler.
It helped to have Sakari Oramo on the podium. Ever since his Birmingham days, the BBCSO’S Finnish chief conductor has shown himself to be a fine Elgarian, and he shaped the massive orchestral ebb and flow while leaving room for Benedetti’s warm tone to register. She traced a silvery line in the dreamlike slow movement with sustained poise.
On either side of this, she dug in to capture the music’s emotional volatility, and in the otherwise mercurial finale, time seemed suspended during the flutterings of the accompanied cadenza: soloist, conductor and orchestra all found the lonely desolation of Elgar’s original genius.
Dvořák’s Symphony No 7 in D minor made an excellent counterweight after the interval. Only a quarter of a century before Elgar composed his Violin Concerto, the then young provincial musician had found his horizons opened by playing under Dvořák’s baton in Worcester, on one of the Czech composer’s several visits to England. It is little wonder that there are echoes of the senior composer’s Stabat Mater in The Dream of Gerontius.
As for Dvořák’s awareness of his place in musical history, no one in the 19th century could have written a symphonic opening in D minor without glancing back at Beethoven’s Ninth, and this performance had its share of Beethovenian striving. Oramo balanced that beautifully with the work’s sense of yearning that reflects the influence also of Brahms, and he kept these impulses in balance across the four movements.
In the second movement, the BBCSO’S players produced glowing warmth in themes that sound almost hymnlike yet breathe the outdoor spirit of nature; this performance restored 40 bars from the movement heard at the premiere in London in 1885 but thereafter cut by the composer. Oramo handled the “furiant” style of Czech country dance in the scherzo with a light touch before unleashing the finale’s brilliant symphonic argument, in which the players clearly relished the knockout tune that Dvořák produces amid the tussle.