BBC SSO/Volkov - Gabrieli, Stravinsky, and Brahms, 11 September 2025

Royal Albert Hall

Gabrieli, arr. Maderna: In ecclesiis
Stravinsky: Requiem Canticles
Gabrieli, arr. Maderna: Canzone a tre cori
Brahms: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.73

Jess Dandy (contralto)

Ashley Riches (bass-baritone)

National Youth Choir

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ilan Volkov (conductor)

Images: BBC / Andy Paradise

A splendid Prom, whose programming was not only fascinating on paper, but grew in fascination, connection, and meaning as the evening progressed, aided no end by fine performances from soloists, the National Youth Choir, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Ilan Volkov. Both halves opened with Bruno Maderna orchestral arrangements of works by Giovanni Gabrieli. First was the polychoral motet In ecclesiis, published posthumously in 1615, and arranged by Maderna in 1966. The variety yet consequential nature of Maderna’s choices concerning antiphonal responses shone through in ravishing performance. A Monteverdian sultriness to chamber passages, the grandeur of a fuller orchestra, adept handling and communication of metrical changes, and the sheer wonder of hearing this music – at long last – on modern instruments made for a wonderful curtain-opener resounding in Venetian splendour. Less ‘faithful’ passages with woodwind, harp, and eventually tubular bells brought similar joy to the ears. It built magnificently and subsided with discernment. Those sectional and consequential qualities were also to be heard in Maderna’s 1972 revisiting of the Conzon XVI à 12. Warm, lively, and highly rhythmical, it was again full of colour, not in an over-the-top Respighi-like way, which has its place, but in an unquestionable effort to communicate the essential qualities of the music to a modern audience. The intrinsic qualities of Gabrielian brass, married to warm, incisive strings and unfailingly well-chosen tempi, would have given pleasure to all but the most narrow-minded of authenticists. 

In between came one of the greatest jewels not only of Stravinsky’s late, serial period, but of his career, the Requiem Canticles heard at the composer’s Venetian funeral in 1971: of the same time, then, as Maderna’s arrangements and hailing from a less dissimilar musical world than some might suspect, old and new similarly united and inseparable. Intensity of drama and excellence of playing marked the opening Prelude: a clear indication of ‘serialism, Jim, but not as we know it’. It could only ever be Stravinsky, of course, and so it sounded, with fresh energy and commitment. The ‘Exaudi’ came to our ears as the Symphony of Psalms heard through a prism of Webern. There was something also of a musical object, even of a religious icon, to it: fitting in so many ways. The National Youth Choir’s warmth, diction, and intonation here and elsewhere were striking, as for instance in the distilled, almost homeopathic power of the following ‘Dies irae’. Ashley Riches joined trumpets and bassoons for an implacable yet human ‘Tuba mirum’, bassoon duetting continuing, amongst a quartet of flutes, and others in a duly hieratic ‘Interlude’ that unmistakeably echoed the music of Gabrieli (at least in this context). The ‘Rex tremendae’ said or sang all that need be said or sung, serial process joyously apparent. Was that Mother Goose putting in a guest appearance, courtesy of a rich-toned Jess Dandy, in the ‘Lacrimosa’? The composer’s direct Verdian homage in the ‘Libera me’, partly fragmented through unforgettable chatter of choral souls, brought us to a world of crystalline, celestial perfection in the ‘Postlude’, Messiaen a closer kindred spirit than I had ever previously imagined. 

The final work on the programme was Brahms’s Second Symphony, here given a thoughtful, striking, never less than coherent reconsideration by Volkov. It was fascinating to hear the lines of its opening texture after – in more than one sense – Gabrieli, whose music Brahms programmed amongst much alte Musik in his Wiener Singakademie concerts. The first movement unfolded relatively swiftly, though never unreasonably so; indeed, the composer’s marking ‘Allegro non troppo’ would be a pretty good summary of what we heard. Volkov handled the many tempo changes convincingly, likewise other, related changes of mood. Here, quite rightly, was a world of perpetual motivic transformation, always ‘becoming’ in developing variation: Schoenberg rather than Schenker, one might say. This was not an especially autumnal Brahms, but rather vernal music – horn calls and all – with decidedly darker undercurrents. It surprised, though never for the sake of surprise – telling phrasing here, a sudden diminuendo there – and cohered throughout, the BBC SSO’s multifaceted strings an ever-shifting backbone, if such a thing can be imagined. 

An involved (emotionally, intellectually, and texturally) second movement again brought the quality of Brahms’s counterpoint to the fore, the composer moving closer still to Schoenberg, yet also to Mozart. I am not sure I have heard this music sound more volatile, ever threatening to bubble over, its deep melancholy and Innigkeit part and parcel of a greater humanism. The third movement’s inheritance from Mendelssohn and Schumann was beautifully clear, though the other side of the coin was a tale of twists and turns, of continued suppression of darker truths. Its darkness was quite different, say, from Furtwängler’s, yet I could not help but think the older conductor might have appreciated it and nodded approvingly. And for all its ambiguity and complexity, there was a not entirely dissimilar overall clarity, even simplicity, to it. When the final movement erupted, hard driven at times yet always flexible, it proved thrilling and satisfying in equal measure, conceived both dramatically and symphonically, yet perhaps closer in scale and even temperament to a homage to Haydn rather than to Beethoven. It made, at any rate, for a winning, boisterous way to close a concert full of treasure.

And yet, meaning no disrespect to this excellent concert, the most electrifying and necessary item was yet to come: not an encore, though a return to the podium by Volkov, in which, visibly and audibly anxious, he, as an Israeli, addressed the audience in heartrending fashion concerning the genocide in Gaza. He gave those who did not wish to hear opportunity to leave, even in the face of abuse from malcontents. It would be remiss of me not to report this, though the BBC, it seems, has declined to do so. (The broadcast had by that time finished, it seems, although footage is widely available from elsewhere.) By the same token, I do not think this is quite the place to enter into any discussion of his words, other than to say I marvelled at and was inspired by his courage and stand in solidarity with him. His words (I hope I have transcribed them correctly) should now speak for themselves: 

In my heart there is great pain now, every day for months. I come from Israel and live there. I love it: it’s my home. But what’s happening is atrocious and horrific on a scale that’s unimaginable. I know that many of us feel completely helpless in front of it. Innocent Palestinians being killed in thousands, displaced again and again, without hospitals and schools, not knowing when's the next meal. Israeli hostages are kept in terrible conditions for almost two years and political prisoners are languishing in Israeli jails. Israelis – Jews and Palestinians – won’t be able to stop this alone. I ask you, I beg you all, to do whatever is in your power to stop this madness. Every little action counts while governments hesitate and wait. We cannot let this go on any longer; every moment that passes puts the safety of millions in risk. Thank you.

Thank you, Ilan (if I may). The conductor has since announced that he will no longer work in Israel.

Britten Sinfonia/Watkin - Handel, Messiah, 16 December 2021

Barbican Hall

Harriet Eyley (soprano)
Jess Dandy (contralto)
Stuart Jackson (tenor)
James Newby (baritone)

Choir of Jesus College, Cambridge (director, organ: Richard Pinel)

Britten Sinfonia

David Watkin (conductor)

Messiahs take many forms. They did during the eighteenth century; they did in the nineteenth; they did in the twentieth; despite the more or less complete victory of ‘authentic’—was ever the term less apt than for this work?—performance practices in the rest of Handel’s œuvre, they have continued to do so in the twenty-first. Sadly, even tragically, the video of that inimitable ‘Handel meets Pop with Messias’, starring the still-more-inimitable Robbin Casey, seems to have vanished not only from YouTube but the planet. (Please do let me know if you have a copy of the original broadcast!) But we still have options ranging from Mozart to McCreesh, from Beecham to Britten Sinfonia. The small forces employed here, including a tiny orchestra (strings 3.3.2.2.1) and a choir of only twenty-six (men and women but not boys of Jesus College), were at least in part a response to the dread virus. They were perhaps not what one might have imagined ideal for the Barbican and would probably have worked better at home in the warmer acoustic of that most magical of Cambridge chapels. One’s ears nonetheless adjusted to aesthetics as well as to pragmatics. Not only would it be churlish and pointless to object too strongly; it would also arguably ignore the fact that pragmatics have almost always been an important part of aesthetics. Handel, after all, never composed a Helicopter-Quartet. 

That a musician such as David Watkin, so well versed in what, for better or worse, we have come to know as ‘historical performance’, would take an anti-Romantic, or perhaps better a non-Romantic, line should have come as little surprise. The Britten Sinfonia’s versatility is such that these players could doubtless follow any lead with equal relish. Nicely detailed playing in, for instance, ‘But who may abide the day of his coming?’ permitted of considerable instrumental drama, whatever the numbers involved. So too, naturally, did that greatest of musical rarities: a true and fine contralto voice, in this case Jess Dandy’s. When it came to ‘He was despised…,’ the plainness of some of the orchestral playing was a little underwhelming, yet Dandy’s voice and interpretation continued to carry the performance.

In any case, Watkin’s direction was in general pragmatic, clearly aiming to build a performance founded not upon an ideal, but on the forces in front of him. If I suspect I shall never share ‘period’ predilection for ending numbers in what I hear as merely perfunctory fashion, I watched and listened eagerly to hear the way Watkin worked with his soloists, no diktat handed down from above, but rather making the most of Stuart Jackson’s dramatic, even operatic flair, Harriet Eyley’s appealingly bell-like soprano, or James Newby’s rich yet agile baritone. So too was this the case for the young choral musicians, for many of whom the past twenty-one months will have been particularly trying. If ‘All we like sheep’ bobbed along amiably, if little more, the winning, Saul-like responsorial singing of ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates’, and agile passage work of ‘Let us break their bonds asunder’ duly impressed, as did the grandeur, finally achieved, of the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus. Most stood, although one peculiar soul, who had disturbed ‘How beautiful are the feet’ and a couple of other numbers with incredibly noisy crisp-eating elected instead to film the performance on his telephone.  Music-making is itself a human good, a human necessity: something none of us should ever forget again, even in the unlikely event further ‘restrictions’ do not return. 

Coloratura was a distinct strength to all concerned: not only ‘in itself’, but as put to dramatic use; so too was stylish and varied ornamentation. This is an oratorio, one can readily forget, that is simply scored. In an unassuming performance such as this, one welcomes perhaps all the more the coming of bright trumpets in ‘Glory to God in the highest’, certainly as much as telling, if often subtle, shifts between numbers in tempo. One size has never fit all, and never will. And if this will never, should never, come across as a dramatic, narrative oratorio in the mode of many of Handel’s, there was much to enjoy in that mode too: Jackson fairly scourging with his voice (‘All they that see Him…’), at times coming across as Handel’s unconscious response to Bach’s Evengelists; Ryder’s tasteful intensification of vibrato for Christ’s resurrection in ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’; and Newby’s moving representation of words and theology, allied to equally fine trumpet-playing (Imogen Whitehead) in ‘The trumpet shall sound’. A euphonious final chorus served not only as fitting aesthetic culmination, but worked as a keenly felt moral metaphor for what we had seen, head, and God willing, participated in too. Amen.

First Night of the Proms – Hyde/BBC SO/Stasevska: Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, MacMillan, and Sibelius, 30 July 2021

Royal Albert Hall

Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music
Poulenc: Organ Concerto in G minor
James MacMillan: When Soft Voices Die (world premiere)
Sibelius: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.43


Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano)

Jess Dandy (contralto)

Allan Clayton (tenor)

Michael Mofidian (bass-baritone)

BBC Singers (chorus-master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Dalia Stasevska (conductor)

Cards on the table. Poulenc aside, I have not previously been a great fan of the music of any of the composers featured in this year’s First Night of the Proms. It does one good, though, to test one’s preferences and prejudices; in any case, this was a moment of return for which I wanted, even needed, to be present, almost irrespective of repertoire. Last year saw a few Proms at the end of the season, albeit with no audience. I was not in London for the summer of 2019, so it was not far off three years since I had lest ventured to the Royal Albert Hall. This was a lovely concert for which to return.


And what piece could be more apt as an opener than Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean hymn to music? (Whatever my ambivalence toward some of Vaughan Williams’s output, I have loved this piece since first hearing it as a schoolboy.) Its London pedigree—premiered here in 1938 by Sir Henry Wood, for whose diamond jubilee as a conductor it was composed—made the Serenade to Music all the more apt. This was a performance imbued with delight from its opening chords, Vaughan Williams’s orchestration and later vocal writing resounding perfectly through the hall’s challenging acoustic. Dalia Stasevska’s direction, untroubled by drab English tradition, drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra sonorities and languor it was difficult not to think of as in the line of Ravel, with whom the composer had studied three decades earlier. Stasevska’s shaping of contours and climaxes was spot on, permitting words and above all music to speak and sing for themselves. Especially memorable (for me) were duetting arabesques between Elizabeth Llewellyn and leader Igor Yuzefovich; the deep summons of ‘affections dark as Erebus’ by Michael Mofidian; Jess Dandy’s contralto call, ‘Music! Hark!’; and the final choral echo of Llewellyn’s ‘sweet harmony’, bathed in sweet orchestral warmth. There were no weak links, though, in a magical performance.


Also written in 1938 was Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, here given an excellent performance by Daniel Hyde, the BBC SO and Stasevska. The splendour of its opening is quite different in nature, of course, yet offered another fine Albert Hall moment. Registration was always well chosen for score and instrument alike. Hyde rightly played his part straight, as did strings whose imploring sweetness seemed to prefigure Poulenc’s later sacred music and even the Dialogues des Carmélites. Wagnerian harmonies were soon put to decidedly anti-Wagnerian use, posing questions rather than answers, Poulenc’s mock-Bachian gestures relishing the fairground of barely suppressed desire. For there was serious questing at the heart of this performance, whatever the masks Poulenc cunningly employed, wit and poignancy two sides of the same coin.


Co-commissioned by the BBC and Help Musicians, When Soft Voices Die, ames MacMillan’s setting of two poems by Shelley, emerged as a workable companion piece for the Vaughan Williams Serenade, using as it does four soloists and orchestra (no chorus). Performances were as committed and variegated as elsewhere, Llewellyn recalling the virtues of her Puccini roles. As for the piece itself, there was craftsmanship in MacMillan’s setting and no denying his taste in verse. Nevertheless, conservatism aside—Vaughan Williams and Poulenc seemed almost avant-garde by comparison—the overall sense was of anonymous proficiency.

Finally Sibelius, with whose symphonies I have long struggled. I shall not bore you with that now, other than to say this was the first performance both to convince and move me. Perhaps it was simply the right time for this music to come knocking on the door, but surely it was more than that: testament to another fine performance, flexible yet directed. by the BBC SO and Stasevska. It was striking that, even to a long-term sceptic, the opening of the first movement seemed to speak as if an old friend. Balletic lightness of touch recalled Tchaikovsky and, beyond him, perhaps more surprisingly, the orchestral writing of Mendelssohn. Not that that precluded the ardent and majestic where required, quite the contrary. Soon I could only wonder what my problem with this music had been. Pizzicato cellos and double basses in the second movement both picked up from the first and contrasted with it. Mendelssohn again came to mind as a processional forerunner, this time the Italian Symphony, though of course the music developed very much in its own, again not un-Tchaikovskian way. At any rate, rhetoric in performance seemed designed to be understood in terms of such inheritance. I am not sure I quite appreciated the movement’s lengths, but that is doubtless my problem; after all, some others still feel that way about Schubert. A third movement full of nervous energy, woodwind in its trio a necessary contrast in many ways, prepared the way for a finale that combined strong senses both of expectation and culmination. We were nearly there, that is, but there was some way yet to go. Stasevska imparted a wondrous sense of inevitability and ultimately triumph to this final leg of the journey. I may not quite be a Sibelius (or Vaughan Williams) convert yet, but greater curiosity has certainly been piqued. Just please do not ask me to sit through The Lark Ascending…