Fifty years to the day after the London Sinfonietta gave its first concert, the orchestra was back on the South Bank to mark its half century. With the Queen Elizabeth Hall currently closed for renovation, the celebration took place in the Festival Hall, and the Sinfonietta itself, a core of 18 players, was boosted to symphonic size for half the programme by alumni from the London Sinfonietta Academy.
Three conductors were involved too. David Atherton, who co-founded the orchestra with Nicholas Snowman, and conducted that very first programme of Tavener and Stravinsky in 1968, took charge of the first half of this concert with The Message, a feisty introductory flourish for clarinet and trumpet by another Sinfonietta veteran Harrison Birtwistle, followed by two 20th-century classics, Stravinsky’s Octet and Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, which the Sinfonietta introduced to Britain in 1970.
The performance of the Stravinsky was gorgeously detailed and characterful but some of Ligeti’s dazzling textural conceits did go astray in the expanse of the RFH. Yet the Chamber Concerto’s intricate clockworks did make a revealing link with the piece by the one-time Ligeti pupil Hans Abrahamsen that received its London premiere in the second half of the concert. The CBSO gave the first British performance of Left, Alone, Abrahamsen’s concerto for piano left hand, in 2016; with George Benjamin conducting, the soloist here was Tamara Stefanovich, fearlessly attacking a solo part that ranges right across the keyboard as it threads its way through the buzzing, chirping mass of orchestral textures.
The whole of the second half of the concert was made up of premieres, though only the Abrahamsen was truly memorable. Perhaps packing a meaningful cross-section of half a century’s music-making into a single concert was always going to be a challenge, but neither of the pieces specially commissioned for the occasion, Deborah Pritchard’s River Above, for solo saxophone (delivered with wonderful suppleness by Simon Haram) and Samantha Fernando’s ensemble piece Formations, lived up to its billing. Neither did the final composite celebration, Encore!, a series of variations on a Purcell hornpipe, with major contributions from 14 composers, and a finale involving 10 more; John Woolrich had artfully stitched the whole thing together, while Vladimir Jurowski attempted to give it coherence from the podium.
• Available to hear on BBC iPlayer until 25 February
