CBSO
Symphony
Hall *****
Saturday’s concert ended with orchestra and
audience waving joyfully to each other, buoyed by the infectious enthusiasm of
principal conductor Kazuki Yamada. Yamada has brought to the CBSO a zest and rebirth in self-belief which has put the orchestra
firmly at the peak of achievement.
Indeed, the diminutive, boyish maestro had said as much
in his introduction to the second half of this all but packed-out concert, when,
working the microphone with an instinctive expertise, he told us, “in the first
half we played Beethoven’s Leonore Overture number ONE, then Shostakovich’s
Cello Concerto number ONE, and now we are going to play Walton’s Symphony
number ONE -- because WE are number ONE, we are the best!”. The affirmative
cheers resounded.
Truth to tell, the Beethoven can only have been
included for its numeric significance. For all the players’ assiduous care over
it (string playing with a chamber-music alertness), it remains a dud piece,
evoking substandard Weber.
The Shostakovich was delivered with concentrated
engagement, so many colloquies between orchestral sections (violas, Elspeth
Dutch’s assertive horn, just two examples) and soloist Sheku Kanneh-Mason.
Beginning with a disconcertingly mellow tone, the cellist gradually acquired
the requisite “edge” to his performance, assaulting us with repetitious
raspings and the energy of his tireless bowing arm. He also had the recourse of
producing a glacial eeriness, before the need to replace a broken string
necessitated a lengthy hiatus. Kanneh-Mason rewarded our patience with a
well-textured pizzicato encore.
And so we came to the greatest symphony composed by
an Englishman, Walton’s First. Its genesis was long and painful, blighted by
emotional and physical crises, its subtext mirroring these struggles, always
closely argued with a cogency to which this superlative account under Yamada
responded with taut elan.
Right from the almost imperceptibly ticking
life-force of the fraught opening, through the biting malice of the scherzo,
the melancholy of the slow movement (the woodwind choir so eloquent here) and
on into the ultimate but hard-won triumph of the finale, this gripped from
start to finish.
Invidious to single out individuals, but timpanist
Matthew Hardy was a almost a continuo presence of many colours, menacing,
assertive, marshalling all the action until the most heart-leaping moment in
the symphony. We had reached the point of Walton’s composer’s block in the
finale, only resolved when Constant Lambert prescribed the writing of a fugue
(the programme-note mentions nothing of this advice), and what an exhilarating
fugue Walton turned out, crowned eventually by an explosion of extra percussion
(second timpanist and all), blazing out after waiting patiently for the best
part of an hour.
No wonder we all erupted at the end, orchestra and
listeners alike.
This almost made me forget my more-than-annoying
start to the evening. Someone in their wisdom has decided to shift the CBSO
Information Desk from its time-honoured and obvious spot at the bottom of the
stairs in the Symphony Hall foyer, to up in the middle of the floor above. This
necessitates a trip up to a higher level to collect tickets and programmes, and
then a descent again to the stalls. At the advanced age of some of us, that is
an imposition.
And it didn’t help that a misguided steward sent me
up to one floor even higher, and time was running out. This is a hapless
experiment which needs to be revisited.
Christopher Morley
ends