As its contribution to the London 2012 festival, the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme has assembled a remarkable orchestra. With none of the hype that is usually a suffocating part of such international projects, the Aldeburgh World Orchestra has brought together young musicians from orchestras and conservatoires from 35 countries across six continents, all selected by online audition: players from the US sit alongside Venezuelans, Iranians next to Israelis, Chinese with Taiwanese, and to judge from this prom Mark Elder has welded them into a very impressive and exuberant unit indeed.
The programme was made up of a BBC commission, flanked by three 20th-century masterworks. If Charlotte Bray felt at all intimidated to have her new piece, At the Speed of Stillness, programmed between the opening Adagio of Mahler's 10th Symphony and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, her music showed no sign of it. Inspired by a poem by the surrealist Dora Maar, Bray's piece is a scherzo whose energy seems at first unfocused, but which gradually coalesces into stomping rhythms and a massive climax, before retracing its harmonic steps to where it all began. The musical plan is lucid, the scoring deft and polished.
Elder had opened with Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, making its finale gentler, more consoling than usual; its Mahlerian connections were emphasised when the first movement from the 10th followed. There he was at pains to make the tempo distinctions between the opening section (marked Andante) and the main Adagio that Mahler indicated, rather than treating the whole thing as a one huge slow movement as so many conductors do; if anything, it makes the music seem even more extraordinary, more forward-looking. The planning of The Rite was equally careful: Elder brilliantly stage-managed its drama, while every section of the AWO made sure not a detail was missed.
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