SYMPHONY HALL played host at the weekend to the annual conference of the Association of British Orchestras. Plenty to discuss, I’m sure, and much to mull over too in Saturday’s big bang of a concert from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Consider this extravagant line-up. The 180 or so voices of the Symphony Chorus, exulting and raging in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. The British premiere of Correspondances in the presence of one of the world’s most distinguished composers, Henri Dutilleux, now 88. Then the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the CBSO’s shock troops, march in for a punchy, irresistible modern classic, Julian Anderson’s Khorovod. Finally, Sibelius’s Fifth: the symphony with the flying swans, the blazing sun and the brand of mounting tension that turns bones to jelly.
This was classical music-making close to its liveliest best. No point in performing the Bernstein timidly: so Sakari Oramo’s forces pitched into the jazzy inflections and melted harmonies with heartfelt passion. Exactitude, too.
At times, surprisingly, Dutilleux’s soprano song cycle Correspondances also made the toes tap. The orchestral writing, accordion included, sped by in a fastidious kaleidoscope of textures and gestures. But there is nothing frivolous about the work’s core: beautiful, sombre settings of two artists’ letters, one from the exiled Solzhenitsyn to the Rostropoviches, another from Van Gogh to his brother.
Dawn Upshaw, of the beautiful bleached tone, introduced the work in Berlin with Simon Rattle in 2003. Saturday’s belated British premiere offered the vibrant Claron McFadden, particularly thrilling when fading her toujours into silence at the end of Solzhenitsyn’s letter of thanks, or shooting high above the staves with Van Gogh at the end. Scintillating, surprising, moving, with enough subtleties to reward multiple hearings, Correspondances shows no weakening of Dutilleux’s powers to enchant.
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After the interval, Anderson’s whirling dervish, Khorovod. And then the Sibelius. No score for Oramo here. No glasses either: this music is in his soul, and he controlled its power with masterful effect as the speeds tightened or broadened, and the swans flew into the sun. If this kind of concert is the by-product, the ABO should have their annual conferences more often.