Review: Britten Sinfonia/Elder at the Barbican (The Times)
Here was a style located precisely between Beethoven and Mahler: smartly articulated, rhythmically flexible, unguarded in its expressivity
Anna Picard, November 13 2017, The Times
Six years have passed since Mark Elder conducted Britten Sinfonia in a performance of L’enfance du Christ that captured perfectly the Beethovenian energy and oriental fragrance of Berlioz’s oratorio. The scent has changed from sandalwood to pine, but as the conductor and ensemble began their first cycle of Brahms symphonies, that energy held fast.
Here was a style located precisely between Beethoven and Mahler: smartly articulated, rhythmically flexible, unguarded in its expressivity and balanced to foreground the woodwind and brass. Here too was programming that emphasised the connection between song and symphony, composer and arranger.
Minimally tweaked for pragmatism and brightness, Britten’s 1941 arrangement of the second movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, What the Wild Flowers tell me, unfolded with elegant simplicity in performance, warmed by Nicholas Daniel’s earthy oboe solo, sweetened by Bruce Nockles’s trumpet and cooled by Thomas Gould’s violin. The wild card was the orchestral version of Gerald Finzi’s The Fall of the Leaf, completed by Howard Ferguson after the composer’s death: a sad glow of low brass and restless, unresolved harmonies under melodies that unwind as an English verismo intermezzo.
Elisabeth Kulman’s clear, evenly modulated voice seemed too composed for the neurotic intensity of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. The beetle-browed orchestration of Um Mitternacht protrudes awkwardly in the cycle, but the delayed resolution of the cor anglais part in Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen cut like a blade and was exquisitely shaped by Emma Fielding.
Elder’s animated reading of Brahms’s First Symphony was anchored in the bitumen tones of the contrabassoon and punctuated by the rasp of hand-stopped horns. Though rooted in the rules of counterpoint, Brahms’s ideas move like a late-Romantic weather front: clouds of strings are pierced suddenly by the sharp light of flute, clarinet or oboe, then regroup in heavy shades of iron and pewter. Played by an ensemble of this size and discipline, the effect was exhilarating.