Royal Albert Hall
Augusta Read Thomas: Dance Foldings (world premiere)
Ives: Orchestral Set no.1: Three Places in New England
Dvořák: Symphony no.9 in E minor, op.95, ‘From the New World’
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Ryan Bancroft (conductor)
An excellent American-themed
concert from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its Californian Principal
Conductor, Ryan Bancroft. It began, as is right, with a new work: Augusta Read
Thomas’s Dance Foldings. For the 150th
anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall, founded to promote the arts and sciences
alike, the BBC has commissioned four new works to reflect the arts and sciences
in our world. Dance Foldings is the
first, Thomas taking as the starting point for her material ‘the metaphors,
pairings, counterpoints, foldings, forms and images inspired by the biological “ballet”
of proteins as they are being assembled and folded in or bodies’. As she
observes, the animations one can view online of proteins folding can resemble
assembly lines or ballets, both types strongly suggesting ‘musical
possibilities’. The sense of ballet music, even without dancers, was strong
from the opening: hard-edged, sharply rhythmic, ‘alive-from-the-inside’. The
orchestra, including piano, suggested a post-Agon world, perhaps even some commonality with Henze, though it was
Stravinsky who more frequently came to mind. There were rhythmic, melodic
cells, but there was also, increasingly, mirroring, chain-like progression, and
transformation, leading us through a musical maze that suggested something both
spontaneous and yet, once done, set in stone (or, perhaps, an amino acid
chain). Urgent, unquestionably forward-looking, and highly colourful, t were a
work and performance both raucous and controlled, as if evoking a life-force
more scientific than often one encounters in the concert hall.
Charles Ives’s First Orchestral Set, Three
Places in New England, followed, an all too rare opportunity to hear Ives’s
orchestral music in the concert hall. I would not say the misty opening of ‘“The
St Gaudens” in Boston Common’ sounded more ‘modern’, but rather differently
modern, its known/found melodies notwithstanding. In highly atmospheric,
expertly shaped performance, it sounded like music of the clouds and/or music
emerging from the clouds. Ligeti was not far beyond—or should that be behind? At
any rate, Ives’s pioneering spirit was unquestionably, poetically present. ‘Putnam’s
Camp’ was admirably clear, the riot of tunes heard against each other and
gaining from that experience without losing their own identity. There was a
fine sense of what I thought of as the programmatically spatial: this was music
in some sense ‘about’ space, temporal space included, irrespective of the space
in which it was performed, or at least not confined by that latter space. Still
more mysterious at its heart, the movement seemed to explore the age-old
dramatic dichotomy of private and public, as well as old and new, in ways that
never ceased to surprise and to enliven. Enigmatic, liminal, ‘The Housatonic at
Stockbridge’ proved in its breadth as complex as its predecessor—so long as one
listened. There was something ineffably human at its base or its far-away,
aurally glimpsed hymn-book source, but there were no easy questions, let alone
answers.
The New World Symphony opened similarly broadly, as if in keeping with social
distancing on stage, yet with no lack of tension. Bancroft’s principal tempo
for the ‘Allegro molto’ was, if anything, on the swift side, but not unreasonably
so. He was flexible too, permitting keen woodwind plenty of opportunity to
sing. There were some strikingly Wagnerian moments to this first movement:
harmonically, but also in the way the cellos ‘spoke’. Grave brass and soft
strings prepared the way for that
melody in the ‘Largo’. It moved, without being harried; in short, again it
sang. As did much else: not in one voice, but in many, more than the sum of
their parts, not entirely unlike Ives’s music. Bancroft shaped the movement unobtrusively,
comprehendingly, another nice touch being the nod to Mendelssohnian
processional (the second movement of the Italian
Symphony, as in the First Night’s Sibelius Second). Indeed, there was a strong
sense of narrative: not necessarily programmatic, but not necessarily not
either. A properly urgent scherzo, to which harmony was as crucial as rhythm
(or melody) gave way, through somewhat disorienting transition, to a polished,
lyrical, rhythmic trio. As for the finale, this may sound facile—perhaps it is—but
it combined and culminated. Lyricism was just as crucial here as elsewhere.
What a tremendous symphony this is, in quite a different league from any other
by Dvořak; and so it sounded here.
