Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast and other tasty morsels…… a concert at the Barbican Centre
BBC Symphony Orchestra and Choir conducted by Edward Gardner
Gerald Finley, baritone….
Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast has been a long time crowd pleaser since it was first performed in 1930s and it still doesn’t fail to please today. And though the concert ended with that piece its is appropriate to begin this review with it….
Walton’s use of the orchestra still astonishes in the vivid, bold sumptuous superfluity of layered sounds….this is a reckless feast of exuberance brought to life by a wondrous cacophony of excessive sound…sometimes almost brassily blaring its vulgarity…Walton paints a musical picture that is quite as unforgettable as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Strauss in Salome….
But there are also other things…faint echoes of what will become the Crown Imperial March for the Coronation of George VI….and the use of a choral sound whose high register must have been inspired by English cathedral tradition…as well as the obligatory nods to Stravinsky, Strauss and even Elgar. There are also things….bleating woodwind sounds… and the dark luminance of the percussion that are very like those sounds Britten uses to such eerie effect…even in his later music like War Requiem and Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The Britten Sinfonia da Requiem was the first piece in the concert…I’d not heard it before and though it is interesting it lacks maybe the magic of the Spring Symphony and so much of the disturbing underbelly of wistful anguish that haunts Britten’s best compositions. It’s still no mean feat of writing and the BBC Symphony Orchestra played in beautifully….especially the lovely elegiac last movement when it really came to life….
But the Sibelius songs and the glorious Belshazzar’s Feast Suite were for me a revelation. Gosh, what a wonderful example of dense composition…and I love the way he takes and develops and idea but then lovingly lets it go…never holding on to the music beyond the point he’s able to give it any more…the songs spoke to the soul and Finley sang throughout the concert with rich, lustrous panache…but never more beautifully or tellingly than in the Sibelius…and The Rapid Rider’s Brides should be in everyone’s collection of great lieder for full orchestra…quite, quite amazing.
Edward Gardner gave a little talk on the Sibelius and he conducted it with such love and care… it was really wonderful to see a musician so engaged upon his work…
As he said it was an odd programme of music for the Christmas concert season…but no worse or less enjoyable for visiting the sobering subjects of death and judgement in this festival of life and light arising in the dark of the year.
One thing though…normally Barbican concerts have a program in their ticket price…I thought the BBC was a little greedy to ask us for £2.50…over and above the ticket price….why is it in Britain the we charge for programmes whereas everywhere else in the world…including the Metropolitan opera in New York…the programme is free…part of the ticket price…it’s is one theatrical tradition I think we could give a decent burial….