The environment took centre stage in a BBC Symphony Orchestra programme that journeyed from Judith Weir and the arid plains of India to Gerald Finzi and the rolling contours of the North Hampshire Downs. Bartók just about ticked the box thanks to the nocturnal sounds of the Hungarian steppe conjured up in his final piano concerto, while Stravinsky’s Firebird struts its stuff around the villainous King Koschei’s enchanted garden.
With Weir’s The Welcome Arrival of Rain, it was the notes on the page that came first. Only latterly did she associate the music with the arrival of the monsoon bringing much-needed water to the parched earth. Glittering fanfares swooped heavenwards answered by shimmering strings before tom-toms and timpani turbocharged an extended series of variations. Sakari Oramo ensured the orchestra shone, even if the promised deluge never quite materialised.
South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son was the beguiling soloist in Bartók’s lyrical Third Piano Concerto, bringing crisp clarity and a poetic flourish to the folk song-inflected melodies while mastering the lush romantic passages with an impressive muscularity. Bringing out the Bachian undertones in an expansive account of the slow movement, her playing was rife with expressive insights while conveying a tangible sense of dialogue with the orchestra. The finale, with its piquant Hungarian rhythms, was a model of elegance and restraint.
Son is a noted musical omnivore, hence, perhaps, the inclusion of Finzi’s Eclogue, a jewel of a piece that blurs the boundary between the Goldberg Variations’ opening aria and one of the composer’s masterly song settings of Thomas Hardy. Her lightness of touch and graceful counterpoint with the velvety BBCSO strings was truly scrumptious.
Oramo is one of those conductors who never imposes his will on a work, allowing the composer to speak his mind through the notes on the page. It made him an ideal interpreter of Stravinsky’s ballet suite in a colourful reading where tempi and dynamics felt just right. A few untidy orchestral corners aside, the enchanted Firebird pirouetted, princesses frolicked and spun, and the wickedly dissonant magician cut his infernal capers. Stravinsky’s Gallop, deliciously tongue-in-cheek, was a well-deserved encore.
