Shakespeare season opens with a bang
As the orchestra closest to Shakespeare country, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra naturally has a role to play in this year’s anniversary celebrations of the Bard. But there is nothing dutiful about its approach to Shakespeare 400: this start of the CBSO’s “Our Shakespeare” season showed it not only getting in ahead of other British bands with its Shakespearean programming, but doing something more interesting than most.
Edward Gardner opened the concert by conducting a great rarity, Richard Strauss’s early tone poem
Macbeth. This work’s neglect is not hard to fathom, for it lacks big tunes, but as a study in darkness it is fascinating. Sounding a little as if the midsummer light of Wagner’s Meistersinger had been switched to midwinter, with touches of Tchaikovsky at his gloomiest, this music blows in stormily and seldom lets up. Icy shivers accompany Lady Macbeth’s entry, and the textures run deep. Gardner drew a brilliantly energised performance that showcased the orchestra at its surging best.
Balancing this was the ballet music from Verdi’s
Macbeth, an obligatory addition when the composer revised his opera for Paris. Verdi’s sophisticated scoring, evoking supernatural elements, inspired the orchestra to play with colour and bite.
The programmes’s homegrown Shakespearean
responses proved less thrilling. Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs were an autopilot contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain, but at least they brought The
Tempest and A Midsummer
Night’s Dream into the concert and prompted fine, diaphanous singing from the CBSO Chorus.
Laurence Olivier’s 1943-4 film Henry V was, in part, a wartime propaganda exercise, and Walton wrote music to fit the bill. The problem with Christopher Palmer’s arrangement of an hour-long concert scenario is that, alongside a few gems, it rescues too much of Walton’s hackwork. But it could hardly have been better done: Samuel West brought wonderful Shakespearean presence to the narration and Gardner conducted with supercharged sweep.
In six months’ time, Gardner will end his last season as the CBSO’s principal guest conductor with more Shakespeare, a concert performance of Verdi’s Falstaff. But before then, possibly very soon, the orchestra’s next music director will be revealed. Smart money is on one of two hot young conductors, either Lithuania’s Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla or Israel’s Omer Meir Wellber. Given this orchestra’s past record in filling the post – think Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo and Andris Nelsons – it’s no wonder the world is watching.