After 12 years at the helm of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sakari Oramo can be forgiven for programming seemingly disparate works simply because they are close to his heart. None were what you’d call standard repertoire, and each posed different challenges, yet somehow this multifaceted concert added up to more than the sum of its parts.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphonic Variations on an African Air is one of his most warmly appealing works, rooted in 19th-century Romanticism while paying homage to his paternal ancestry. Over 20 minutes, he puts the agreeably malleable spiritual, I’m Troubled in Mind, through its paces, from solemn dirge for the enslaved to cymbal-crashing Edwardian paean. Oramo’s flexible beat saved the work from ever getting bogged down, allowing the music room to breathe while avoiding potential longueurs. This was plain-speaking, big-hearted fare, full of luscious countermelodies, which the orchestra pulled off with appropriate swagger.
Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto “Concentric Paths” seems almost part of the canon these days, a testament to the violinists who have taken it up over the last 20 years. Christian Tetzlaff proved well suited to its technical demands, his laser-focus and white-hot tone capable of cresting the heaviest orchestral swell. His performance here was blisteringly virtuosic, especially in the daredevil upper register where he positively thrives. Contrariwise, the slow movement saw him hovering in the air for a moment of radiant stillness, before cutting a dash in the jaunty, syncopated finale.
Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite is a bit of a sleeper in the concert hall, despite the popularity of its second movement, The Swan of Tuonela. Oramo, the composer’s compatriot, took evident delight in revealing the pleasures to be found elsewhere, as in Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island, with its earthy dances and priapic orchestral crescendos. The Swan worked its usual misty magic, cor anglais and cello particularly eloquent, while shuddering strings and sinister Wagnerian chorales conjured up the gloomy mysteries of the Finnish underworld. The finale, in which the resurrected hero gallops home in triumph, found conductor and orchestra basking in some of the composer’s sunniest music.
