FIERY LEILA IGNITES ADÈS’ CONCERTO
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
Thomas Adès Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’ is an adversarial work despite its title hinting at planetary trajectories and celestial harmonies. At times the soloist faces a barrage of musical missiles with only a fiddle to fend them off. When Leila Josefowicz entered it was clear that this would be a genuine contest. Looking like the titular figure from Prokofiev’s opera ‘The Fiery Angel’ sheathed in a spectacular scarlet gown, half sparkling sequins half flouncing tulle, she shimmered and coruscated like a slim living flame. Adès packs a huge amount into the concerto’s concentrated three-movement twenty-minute span. It begins with the musical equivalent of a collective orchestral throat clearing. Like pugilists, the violinist and orchestra circle warily around each other, the brass and wind delivering jabs and punches, the soloist fending them off with furious, frenzied, unrelenting bowing. The second, and longest, movement opens with a minatory brass onslaught but Josefowicz gradually bent the orchestra to her will – like Beethoven’s Orpheus and the Furies contest in the fourth piano concerto – and the music becomes less astringent and often lyrical. The third movement opens with a sinuous swaying orchestral refrain redolent of Moroccan music, soloist and orchestral now in a more friendly union and the final bows-aloft flourish was as celebratory as Mendelssohn’s concerto. I reviewed Pekka Kuusisto and the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of the work in 2019 which emphasized its modernity. Josefowicz and conductor Thomas Søndergård revealed the continuities it shares with the great concerto tradition.
The concert’s start was exhilarating as Søndergård launched the CBSO’s collective 0-60mph instant acceleration in Richard Strauss’s tone poem ‘Don Juan’ – one of the great opening flourishes in all music. It’s all thrusting macho virility and swagger until Juan’s encounter with a beautiful girl, realized by Lucie Sprague’s tender and winsome oboe. In the concert programme Lowri Porter, leader of the CBSO’s second violins, said the work contained, “one of my top goosebump musical moments with the heroic horn section”. I agree and it was stirringly realized here. Strauss based his work on Nikolaus Lenau’s drama not Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera so our hero isn’t dragged off to hell but at the height of a duel discards his sword and welcomes death, and the music collapses into silence, a brilliant dramatic coup.
In Brahms Symphony No.2 Søndergård didn’t overlook the darker elements of this predominantly relaxed and affable work, a musical exhalation after the dark-browed proto-Beethoven first symphony. The opening sidled in shyly before expanding into that broad, and musically fruitful, opening theme. The Allegro con spirito finale had ample bite and energy with Søndergård resisting the temptation of an unscripted accelerando finish. The slow movement was beautiful with the CBSO’s cello section relishing Brahms’ gift of being first to play its gorgeous melody. Elspeth Dutch’s plangent horn solo was also a highlight of this performance.
Norman Stinchcombe