Variations on La Marseillaise (Balbastre), Scherzo from Symphony No 6 (Vierne), In Paradisum (Dubois), Scherzo (Gigout), Grande Pièce Symphonique Franck)
Douglas Mews at the organ
Presented by the Wellington Convention Centre
Month: August 2009
Cantoris – Simple Song
Cantoris (Music Director – Rachel Hyde)
Music by Schumann, Ravel, Body,
Brahms, Britten
St Peter’s Church, Willis St.,
Saturday 8th August 2009
As was the case with Cantoris’s previous concert “Amaryllis and Absalom”, both the venue, the gorgeously-appointed St.Peter’s Church on Willis St, and a beautifully laid-out booklet programme containing commentaries and texts of the song-settings, admirably set the scene for the choir’s most recent exploration of the choral repertoire, an attractive programme entitled “Simple Song”. Cantoris director Rachel Hyde welcomed us to the concert and talked briefly about each bracket of songs and of some of the things she and the choir were attempting to realise in their performance. The four Schumann works for double choir which opened the programme were a pleasing choice, the singers quickly able to demonstrate their technical skills and expressive range with nice melodic work in thirds, good dynamic control and a living, breathing flexibility of pulse throughout. I particularly enjoyed the second piece Ungewisses Licht, a piece describing a lonely traveller’s journey through the storms of intense privation towards a distant beckoning light, the singers nicely and truly differentiating the major/minor oscillation of “ist es die Liebe, is es der Tod?” at the end.
Ravel’s gorgeous Trois Chansons are settings of texts by the composer, his only work for unaccompanied choir. The women’s voices tended to overshadow the men’s throughout, carrying the argument, except for the tenor line in the second song Trois beaux oiseaux, which was nicely focused and sensitively delivered. Again in the third song, the riotous Ronde, the women’s voices nicely captured the fantastic character of the setting, the voices relishing the rhythmic and colouristic possibilities given by the grotesque made-up names of the creatures of the Ormonde Woods. Still more “invented” language was brought into play by Jack Body, with his Five Lullabies 1988-89, music whose inspiration stemmed from the composer’s encounters with various exotic cultures, the sounds of both language and music being brought into play. Body makes the point that lullabies might not be always sung for the purpose of sleep; and while several of the settings did produce a mesmeric effect, the fourth sounded more like a “work-song”, energetic and invigorating. The fifth setting returned our sensibilities to the world of dreams, using the Filipino word “calumbaya”, the music filled with haunting, Sibelius-like held notes, as if sounding from a magical island, the divided choirs setting a beautifully-floated sonic backdrop around a more energetic striving figuration in the foreground, creating something altogether rich and strange – very nice.
Brahms used selections from a particularly rich vein of German Marian poetry, called thus after Mary, the mother of Jesus, and also Mary Magdalene, who was one of Jesus’s followers – the poetry uniquely combines a folk tradition with religious symbolism, a point made by Rachel Hyde when stressing the importance of language and its clarity and colour in performance. The songs made a telling contrast after the attractive astringencies of Jack Body’s music, the choir making the most of its storytelling opportunities with progressions such as the angel’s annunciation to Mary of her impending motherhood in the opening song Der englische Gruß. Perhaps not surprisingly, parts of the music have a Mahlerian melancholy, the opening of the second Marias Kirchgang having something of the fatalistic tread of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge, as does the sixth Magdalena, relating the Magdalene’s discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, music with “haunted” harmonies and dynamics. Strong, atmospheric singing throughout.
Benjamin Britten’s Five Flower Songs gave us the lightness and buoyancy we needed at the concert’s end, the voices relishing the piquant skills of the composer’s varied responses, from the opening strongly-focused lines of Daffodils, through the tricky fugalities and finely-wrought dying fall of Four Sweet Months and the jagged, droll-sounding Marsh Flowers, to the delicately-etched harmonies of Evening Primrose, with its sun-drenched death-knell at the end. And with the most engaging syncopations and antiphonal cross-stitchings of the saucy Ballad of Green Broom to finish, the choir was able to conclude its concert with a spring and a smile and an exhalation of pure pleasure, the acclaim of its audience at the end richly deserved.
Musica Sacra: first of three baroque concerts
Harmonische Freude – German Baroque music – directed by Robert Oliver
Telemann: ‘Sei getreu bis in der Tod’, TWV1:12184, Quartet No 6 in E minor; Phillipp Heinrich Erlebach: Songs from Harmonische Freude, Nos 12, 21, 14, 2; J S Bach: ‘Der Herr denket an uns’ BWV 196.
Baroque Voices (director: Pepe Becker; Katherine Hodge, John Fraser, David Morriss), Academia Sanctae Mariae (leader: Gregory Squire, with Anne Loeser, Shelley Wilkinson, Katrin Eickhorst-Squire, Robert Oliver, Douglas Mews)
Church of St Mary of the Angels, Sunday 2 August 2009
The collaboration of two groups, vocal and instrumental, under the title Musica Sacra, has been presenting a series of concerts in the latter part of the year at St Mary of the Angels for a number of years. As far as I’m aware, the Academia performs in no other context, but Baroque Voices has a long-standing presence in Wellington as a chamber choir.
This was the first of the three concerts of their 2009 series, this one devoted to German sacred music: two familiar composers, but one unknown, I imagine, to most of us.
Telemann came first, with a cantata that could well pass for Bach to all but the specialist. Instruments played a slow introduction and then the four solo voices entered one at a time, well contrasted and stylistically sensitive. The following sections allowed each voice its turn; David Morriss’s bass seems to have developed in both projection and resonance since I last heard him; in the alto part, Katherine Hodge displayed a most attractive timbre that expressed the gentle piety of the words. The combination of Pepe Becker’s ecstatic soprano with Robert Oliver’s bass viol seemed rather at odds with the scourging words, reviling ‘vain pleasure’; and finally John Fraser sang the more sprightly tenor aria with a voice more at ease with the physical world, accompanied by violins.
Telemann wrote six instrumental quartets – not really the forerunners of Haydn’s – for Paris. Some features: the flute part taken by Katrin Eickhorst-Squire on a ‘voice flute’ = recorder, Squire’s violin given to flamboyant cadenzas, Robert Oliver’s viola da gamba, enjoying some particularly attractive passages, and Douglas Mews at the chamber organ (lent by the NZ School of Music) duetted charmingly with the recorder in the second movement. The organ, often embedded in the continuo textures, supplied a bass timbre in genial contrast to the bass viol.
In contrast to the cantata, these chamber pieces for a Parisian audience, much in triple rhythm, showed signs of the emerging ‘galant’ style, marking the end of the Baroque age.
The programme note enlightened (most of) us about the composer Erlbach, of the generation before Bach. Most of his works were lost in a fire but these songs, for all the strangely naïve piety of the words, proved beautifully adapted to soprano, alto and tenor and also offered rewarding passages, for example in song XIV, for violinists Squire and Loeser and gambist Oliver. The music, one had to say, was a rather more cultivated than the words.
I couldn’t help reflecting on the nature of contemporary English or French poetry, both with several centuries of prolific, more polished and cultivated literary activity than had taken place in German lands. And their civilizations had not been rent by a Thirty Years War.
Yet the words and music again gave Pepe Becker, alone in Song II, scope for floating the long flowing lines that were beautifully enhanced by the church acoustic.
The programme note claimed this to have been the New Zealand premiere of Bach’s Cantata No 196 (it must be very hard to be certain), thought to be for a family wedding. This performance should result in its gaining a foot-hold, for it is a setting of great musical delight, starting with a chorus of celebratory vitality. And then an aria for soprano and a duet for tenor and bass, a chance to hear David Morriss, this time, in happy wedding spirit.
The programme had been devised so that lesser but by no means worthless music laid the ground for this fine, entertaining Bach cantata and it left the audience well contented.
Zephyr and Diedre Irons at Paekakariki
Paekakariki Mulled Wine Concert Series 2009
Zephyr Winds (NZSO Principals): Bridget Douglas (flute) / Robert Orr (oboe) / Phil Green (clarinet) / Robert Weeks (bassoon) / Ed Allen (horn) – with Diedre Irons (piano)
MOZART – Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat K.452
BARBER – Summer Music Op.31
BERIO – Opus Number Zoo
POULENC – Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet
Paekakariki Memorial Hall, Sunday 2nd August 2009
We were packed in with a vengeance at the Paekakariki Memorial Hall on Sunday afternoon, our seats almost at the very back and with little or no sight-lines extending to the musicians (the floor has no raised platform for the performers), causing me some anxieties regarding being able to fully “connect” with the music-making. I needn’t have worried – over the heads of the shoulder-to-shoulder throng came the opening measures of the Mozart, gloriously sounded (a combination of lively acoustic and brightly-focused projection from the players) and instantly engaging, quickly putting to rest the rustling ambiences of an audience settling down. The Largo introduction blossomed into an allegro moderato, the playing achieving such felicities of articulation, buoyancy and balance between the instruments as to bring constant pricklings of pleasure to the listener. Diedre Irons’s playing made the piano sound almost like a wind instrument, its strength, agility, flexibility and singing tone blending with what the other players were doing in subtle give-and-take interplay. The full-throated wind choir at the slow movement’s beginning again engaged the piano in a beautifully-written conversation of equals, with lovely explorations of different harmonies in a middle section where the music goes in and out of the sunlight, the tensions resolved in a way that perhaps reflected its creator’s desire for both diversity and order in the world.
In the Rondo Allegretto finale, the music continued its philosophical bent, its poised, at times liquid rhythms incorporating a lyrical and in places melancholic aspect within the same pulse, especially in a somewhat restless middle section. The playing continued to delight, no more than at a lovely concerto-like cadence point of questioning, after which the winds were able to diffuse the tension nicely and return the argument to the poise and urbanity of the opening.
By way of attempting to brighten up our recent wintry Wellington woes, Zephyr undertook Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music”, a lovely, indolent-sounding work enlivened by chirruping energies, conveying a “nature-at-play” ambience against which passages of gentle melancholy perhaps reflect the feelings of the beholder experiencing such seasonal rites. The players took us through a number of beautifully-characterised episodes, at one point the oboe instigating a quasi-oriental dance joined by flute and bassoon, the latter trying the same steps later on his own, to the delight of flute and oboe, whose amused riposte rippled through the ensemble. Just before the end, the music began a kind of journeying aspect, whose rhythmic tread briefly suggested a railway adventure, but with the return of the languid opening music, the impetus was lost, and the bassoon’s final attempt to dance again provoked another tantalising outbreak of mirth whose elfin disappearance came as quickly as its ready laughter.
People not normally drawn to contemporary classical music might have initially swallowed uncomfortably at seeing the name of Luciano Berio on the programme, a well-known experimental composer and pioneer of electronic music. They need not have worried – “Opus Number Zoo” demonstrates a lighter, more playful side of the composer’s activities, the four pieces settings with multiple narrators of allegorical texts whose parallels can be found in the Aesop Fables. Its musical equivalents inhabit a world not unlike that of Stravinsky, in “The Soldier’s Tale”, though there’s also a Waltonesque whimsy in some of the narrations that remind one of “Façade”. The first “Barn Dance” tells the tale of the poor silly chick who danced with a fox (flutist Bridget Douglas demonstrating hitherto unrevealed Thespian skills of an advanced order, here, with her vivid vocal characterisations!), the droll “That’s all, folks!” at the end occasioning a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. “The Fawn” is a bleak meditation on armaments and war-mongering, with ascending, expressive wind-textures highlighting the apocalyptic nature of the scenario; while ”The Grey Mouse” is a droll commentary on youth and age, the musician-speakers demonstrating a wonderfully precise vocal ensemble. Finally, in “Tom Cats”, a confrontational tale of greed and envy, Bridget Douglas’s voice was again to the fore, with the players engaging in “stand and deliver” antics with their instruments at cardinal points – all very entertaining!
After these tongue-in-cheek coruscations it was left to Francis Poulenc to restore some equanimity to our sensibilities with his Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet. The attention-grabbing opening plunged us into a carnival atmosphere, with scenes involving trick-cyclists, jugglers and clowns, everything vividly depicted with sharply-etched playing from Diedre Irons and Zephyr. The bassoon called a halt with an eloquent recitative, answered by the piano, and then evolving into one of those wonderfully “bitter-sweet” melodies beloved of twentieth-century French composers, the mood becoming impassioned, then becalmed, before plunging back into the festive energetics of the opening. Throughout all of this, the ensemble took each different episode in its stride, delivering the music’s variegated moods with tremendous élan. The slow movement, with its oboe-led song-like opening had a dreamlike “drifting-harmonic” aspect, which a burst of jog-trot energy momentarily and cheekily overlaid; while the players threw themselves into the finale’s almost Dadaist energies at the outset with plenty of manic vigour, sanities restored by several of Poulenc’s wonderful astringent melodic episodes, and a surprisingly rhetorical , almost chorale-like ending, delivered by the Zephyr players and Diedre Irons with just the right amount of mock-seriousness.
Occasionally reviewers have experiences which cause them to doubt their own listening abilities and capacities, one such for me being the small encore piece given us by the ensemble at the concert’s end – it turned out to be the animated section of the Poulenc Sextet’s slow movement, which I did think I’d “heard before somewhere” but didn’t recognise! Bridget Douglas comforted me by telling me that people had been caught out before by Zephyr’s repetition of that section of the music: “Out of context it sounds quite different” she told me. That, and the fact that I’d not heard the work before, did give me some comfort, but nevertheless I was abashed at not recognising it for what it was at the time – zut alors!
T’ang Quartet and John Chen in fine concert at the Ilott
Wellington Chamber Music Society concert
Schnittke: Quintet for piano and strings, Gao Ping: Piano Quintet, Dvořák: Piano Quintet No 2 in A, Op 81
T’ang Quartet (Wilma Smith and Ang Chek Meng – violins, Han Oh – viola, Leslie Tan – cello) and John Chen (piano)
Ilott Theatre, Sunday 2 August 2009
Though it is fair to say that Wellington’s taste for new music is probably more adventurous than that of other major cities, it may well have been the pulling power of musicians of such distinction as these that attracted an around 80 percent audience to a programme containing two contemporary works, one newly commissioned and the other probably unfamiliar to 95 percent of the audience.
There were two changes in the quartet’s personnel for this tour. The regular leader, Ng Yu-Ying, was replaced by Wilma Smith and violist Lionel Tan by Han Oh.
Schnittke can hardly be described in terms of other composers of his generation, except in fairly general and unhelpful ways. One might be to say music of the time this piece was composed – the mid 1970s – was still heavily in thrall to the avant-garde, with its conviction that the widening gap between composers and audiences was the latter’s problem. Some of it, from composers of genuine genius, has gained a place in our auditory hard-drive, some has disappeared without trace, while some cling to a raft becoming crowded with more interesting and congenial makers of music of recent years, but may survive:
I think Schnittke is in this last class. While there is a core of music lovers sympathetic to his music on account of his personal situation vis a vis the Soviet Union and his persistent ill-health, there are as many who are sceptical of his aesthetic and the validity of his musical impulses.
This piano quintet, however, seems to spring from a genuine creative inspiration, with less of the trade-mark poly-stylism that strikes many as a gimmick or as a way of masking a lack of melodic invention. It clearly describes a time of personal loss through its spare, bleak textures, long-sustained single notes, the emptiness of the mocking waltz of the second movement, the Andante with its microtones laced with little glissandi, finally closing in a mood of timid hope. John Chen’s role was conspicuously in command of the piano’s striking, sometimes eccentric contribution; the string players clearly understood its emotions and the musical means by which they were expressed, eventually finding some kind of peace in the last movement.
Gao Ping’s piece was commissioned by the Christchurch Arts Festival where it was played, in fact, the day after the Wellington performance.
A piece rather more typical of the current musical climate, music that does not sound so disturbed; in fact, presenting a sunny scene, Though each of the four movements is some sort of reflection on the four qualities that are significant in ancient Chinese literary life, efforts to bear them in mind through the performance seemed superfluous, even irrelevant.
The flow of the music and the rewarding writing for individual instruments, the cello in particular in the third part (Bamboo), made any concerns with non-musical ideas fade away. In the last section, the viola (Han Oh, seemingly perfectly in accord with his colleagues) took charge of a beguiling tune that, teasingly, refrained from evolving as it wanted to. Leader Wilma Smith was notably comfortable in the quartet, in this work, capturing the tone of the Chinese violin, such as the erhu, idiomatically.
The second piano quintet by Dvořák is one of the most loved in the repertoire. Its hearing does, unfortunately, prompt the question in the mind, ‘why is it not possible for today’s composers, some of whom must be comparably gifted with melodic fecundity, to write such music built on beautiful melody that is worked out with such impulsive delight’.
Wilma Smith again sounded in full command of the piece, responding to the style of her colleagues with great warmth; and cellist Leslie Tan took full advantage of his opportunities both at the start of the first movement and the passages of lovely, sustained lyricism in the second movement. Though John Chen was very much a star of the concert, his fluent and interesting playing never drew attention to itself even though one’s ear was constantly enchanted by his perfectly judged role, and contributed to a wonderful unity of spirit through the joyful Finale.
Great Romantics – NZSO on tour
DEBUSSY – Prélude á l’aprés-midi d’un faune
RACHMANINOV – Piano Concerto No.2 in C Minor
SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.10
Alexander Melnikov (piano)
Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)
Michael Fowler Centre,Wellington, Saturday, 1st August, 2009
The orchestra undertook an “all-main centres” tour with this programme, finishing in Wellington on a Saturday afternoon in August. Both visiting artists, pianist Alexander Melnikov and conductor Mark Wigglesworth had elicited glowing opinions for previous overseas performances of some of the featured works, and had already been praised by local critics for their work with the orchestra in its other “Great Romantics” programme. So it was with the highest expectations that we took our seats in the Michael Fowler Centre to enjoy the prospect of an afternoon’s richly-wrought music-making.
The programme couldn’t have begun more beguilingly than with Bridget Douglas’s first flute strains at the opening of Debussy’s “Prélude á l’aprés-midi d’un faune”. It was music breathed into being more than “played”, supported by finely-honed chording from the winds and sensuous colouring from harps and horns. Wigglesworth and the orchestra achieved wonders of spontaneous flow, every line seemingly “free” and uniquely woven, with different timbres and colourings happening by instinct as it were. And when the flute took up the melodic line again, the music blossomed afresh, the two flutes in unison at the climax of the melody in perfect accord, clarinet and oboe unable to contain themselves, and augmenting the flow to where the strings were gratefully waiting, embracing the melodic contourings with sensuous warmth. Debussy rang the ambient changes as the work proceeded, a lovely rhythmic trajectory, at once firm-footed and languorous, underpinned gently floated wind octaves, subtle touches of silvery percussion (was that Lenny Sakofsky sitting among the brass players conjuring those magical scintillations from what seemed like the ether?) adding to the magic. At the end, we in the audience were the ones who were enchanted.
Romantic feeling of a darker and more urgent kind was introduced by the Rachmaninov concerto, even if pianist Alexander Melnikov’s opening chords began the work a shade perfunctorily, as if he were unconcerned to match sonorities with the orchestra’s richly velvet tones at its first entry. Throughout the opening and when introducing the second subject Melnikov continued to keep things cool, refusing to fully “command” the music, but instead treat his part almost as a kind of obbligato, part of the overall musical texture. While this ought to have worked in theory, for me it all imparted a detachment somewhat at odds with the music’s emotional core, as if the pianist was playing Saint-Saens rather than Rachmaninov, delicacy and elegance to the fore rather than a sense of every note meaning something worthwhile.
Wigglesworth and the orchestra generated a good deal of maestoso weight during the movement’s march-like central section, something that Melnikov slightly undermined by pressing slightly ahead of the beat, taking away some of the music’s sheer grandeur and leaving an impression of impatience. Some beautiful sounds from the orchestra, though – as in the other works throughout the concert, Ed Allen’s horn-playing was something to die for, and the ‘cellos played their lyrical ascending figure a little later with aching loveliness. Melnikov didn’t really respond to these oases of lyrical refurbishment amid the movement’s darkness, instead continuing to play things coolly and keeping the pulse to the fore, the coda moving towards its terse climax almost before one was ready for it. Again, in the slow movement, Wigglesworth and the players prepared a beautifully-phrased opening which Melnikov treated extremely casually in reply, creating little magic with his arpeggios, content to let the wind players sing out and squeeze the emotional juices. The big climax of the movement came and went with little frisson from the soloist, seeming to continue his “once-removed” attitude towards the music. Quite suddenly, with the brief cadenza, a change was magically wrought – harp-strummed, almost bardic chords from Melnikov invigorated the piano textures, and led to a hushed reprise of the “big tune”, winds and strings absolutely gorgeous and the piano in quiet raptures right up to the end. Why did the man wait so long before finally deciding to dig into the music?
The finale was again a curious affair, filled with imaginative touches and occasional disjointed moments from the soloist. Melnikov’s sweeping brilliance at the beginning, a bit splashy but extremely exciting, worked well with the on-the-spot orchestral contributions, the pizzicati during the brief scherzando episode really “telling” for a change, as the pianist danced up and down the keyboard. Melnikov and Wigglesworth went for a more massive effect than usual in the big build-up towards the fugato, whose speeding-up seemed to me a bit contrived, the music obviously wanting earlier to burst out of its constraints and race towards its contrapuntal trystings; but the second appearance of the big “Brief Encounter” tune was wonderful, with orchestra and pianist again “finding” each other, romantic feeling answered with poetry and tenderness. The final section had its “stop-start” moments, with Melnikov wanting to go faster than the orchestra with each of his soloistic episodes; but the grand final piano-and-orchestra peroration was undeniably spectacular, with all the requisite keyboard fireworks from the soloist and richly-singing orchestral tones.
In response to audience acclaim, Melnikov sat down to play an encore – and with the first few notes of Rachmaninov’s B Minor Prelude (the one that pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch christened “The Return”) the pianist seemed utterly transformed – the “every-note-counts” commitment that I’d felt was lacking in the concerto was suddenly manifest in earnest, Melnikov catching that aching “tug” between urgency and stasis in those opening utterances so characteristic of the composer’s music. As the work moved into its more agitated central episode, we were made to feel all of the pent-up emotion and world-weariness of the long-absent traveller in sight of his homeland – the sounds caught every impulse and instinct, both compulsive and ambivalent, whose interaction gives the music its underlying power. Interestingly, Melnikov chose to “brush in” the flashing pianistic figurations of the climax instead of giving them the usual rhetorical glint and edge, which worked beautifully in the context of the searing concentration he applied to the overall musical argument. The final utterances of the piece are cries which mingle joy, longing and foreboding; and Melnikov brought out their complexities with a sure instinct, weighting his touch with enough dying fall to leave us in a limbo of uncertainty and darkness. Coming after the disappointment of the concerto, this encore performance left me – well, dumbfounded!
Mark Wigglesworth himself contributed the programme note for Shostakovich’s mighty Tenth Symphony, stressing the links in the music between Stalinist repression and brutality in Russia and the composer’s belief and determination that the human spirit would survive come what may. Shostakovich himself talked about the connections between the music and Stalin; and the torturous nature of the emotional terrain through which both this and the equally epic Eighth Symphony travels demonstrates a powerful, consistently disturbing and at times frightening relationship between style and content which the composer himself may have matched but never surpassed in later works.
The performance amply demonstrated Wigglesworth’s credentials as an interpreter of the composer’s music, from the dark menace of the symphony’s very opening (reminiscent of Fafner’s cave in “Siegfried”), through the gratuitous brutality and the fire-alarm terror of the Scherzo’s frenetic storm, and the grotesqueries of the Allegretto Third Movement’s spectral dance, to the gritty optimism of the finale. Throughout the NZSO played with the utter conviction and surety of musicians who had swallowed a work whole and tapped all of the music’s inherent power and depth of expression. Perhaps there wasn’t quite the knife-edged intensity one experiences when listening to recordings by some of the great Russian interpreters such as Mravinsky, Kondrashin and Svetlanov; but in general Western musicians don’t have access to the same culture of direct experience of war and oppression which obviously gave many of those pre-Perestroika Soviet performances such a brutally stricken ethos.
To analyse Wigglesworth’s and the orchestra’s performance closely would stretch this already elongated review to unacceptable bounds – however each of the movements featured remarkable realisations of aspects of the composer’s vision. In the first movement the transition via solo clarinet and strings from the Winterreise-like loneliness of the opening to the pulse-quickening episode with flute and strings was magically achieved, as telling as the heartbreak of the strings climbing towards the piccolo’s distant visionary angel-spectre at the movement’s end. The orchestral onslaught in the second movement had an elemental wildness (Laurence Reese’s timpani strokes positively apocalyptic at one point!), the strings surviving a brief moment of imprecision towards the end to help with driving the argument to its conclusion, the playing eliciting a stunned silence in the auditorium at the brutality and ferocity of it all. Ed Allen’s magnificent horn-playing dominated the third movement, with its repetitions of the five-note theme, the last being a magically “stopped’ call from another world. And it was the wind players who so splendidly articulated the finale’s opening, the oboe’s call of desolation mingling with the bassoon’s sober soliliquies, and flute and clarinet despairingly trying to goad each other into launching a dance of defiance, one which succeeds in activating the mighty show of white-knuckled optimism that concludes the work. Conductor and players – a magnificent achievement, indeed!