Tag Archives: Vaughan Williams

BBC SSO / Wigglesworth

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s over a decade since the BBC SSO’s memorable focus on the Vaughan Williams symphonies under Andrew Manze opened our ears to those that might not be so familiar as the Sea Symphony or Sinfonia Antartica. One bold, bumper London 2012 Proms programme ambitiously packaged together the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth, the first of these proving a revelation for many unfamiliar with its enigmatic harshness and perfunctory conclusion.

In the SSO’s first Thursday concert of 2025 the Fourth was revisited, this time under the orchestra’s current chief conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, in this instance as the brusque conclusion to a journey through Mozart and Britten. That, in itself, offered a broader context for the work. Where Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor, K491 – the sole presentation in a short first half – elicited a ruminative Classicism tinged with Romantic pre-echoes, Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes ‘A Time There Was…’, a quintessential gem from his twilight years, proved a salty appetiser to the surface brutalism of the Vaughan Williams.

Wigglesworth’s own view of this 1930s’ symphony seemed both forceful and cautious. The compelling severity of the opening – spookily heralded by one of many mobile phone alerts going off among the audience in anticipation of Storm Eowyn – was instantly captivating, the SSO in virile form, responsive to the music’s unrelenting dissonance. Yet out of this deepening abyss emerged moments of unmatched beauty, rich veins of Vaughan Williams’ calm, even suggestions of autumnal mists conjured up by densely atmospheric lower-string textures.

In the Andante moderato, underpinned by its anxiously persistent walking bass, Wigglesworth gleaned an aching austerity, a Shostakovich-like leanness heightened by its powerful organic crescendos. The final two movements, linked in a manner similar to Beethoven’s Fifth, marked a potent return to the belligerence of the start, mischievously insurgent in the Scherzo and curtly ferocious in the barbarous Epilogue fugato. It wasn’t the tightest, most terrorising final vision of this symphony, but it had plenty to say, especially in terms of its softer undercurrents.

In relation to that, Britten’s 1974 Suite was an exquisite confection, throwing up folk melodies and tossing them aside with frivolous abandon and invention in the course of its five-movement journey. From the dream-like soundscape of The Bitter Withy (echoes of Britten’s own A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to the rustic vulgarity and warped harmonic logic of Hankin Booby and brusquely playful strings of Hunt the Squirrel, this was a gripping performance.

Wigglesworth played the dual role of soloist-director in the Mozart concerto, serving up a vision that certainly drew out the reflective dimension of the minor-key work, but never quite got to grips with its inner drive. Everything was tidy and precise but generally inconsequential, even in an ambitious first movement cadenza that veered towards Busoni and beyond. There was something a little too sleepy about the Larghetto, and where a sudden spark lit up the opening Finale theme, the ensuing variations fell short of matching that promise.

Ken Walton

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. The programme is repeated at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Sunday 26 January, which will also be recorded for future broadcast.

SCO Academy / Manze

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City Halls, Glasgow

It’s extraordinary what Vaughan Williams achieved with his 1950 Concerto Grosso, a work for strings conceived on several levels of player competency, from adept professionals to beginners on open strings, that somehow sounds as if no compromises have been made in achieving the ultimately wholesome, intense musical result. 

It’s also remarkable that this particular assemblage of mixed-ability musicians – seasoned members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra outnumbered by youngsters from the City of Edinburgh Council Instrumental Music Service, Glasgow CREATE and St Mary’s Music School – produced a performance that never once fell below the level of consummate artistry. “These are the future,” declared conductor Andrew Manze from his rostrum. Let’s hope our political masters were listening and provide them with one.

Then there was Manze himself, newly appointed as principal guest conductor of the SCO, and already, in his second week, proving how generous a figure he is on top of his energising musical prowess and affable communication skills. 

Clearly his influence over the SCO Academy players – they and their tutors had worked together over the past two weekends rehearsing this music – was both penetrating and inspiring. From the very opening of the Concerto Grosso, a baked blanket of instantly identifiable Vaughan Williams, the quality of sound and alertness of response was magical and captivating. Beyond that curtain-raising Intrada came an edgy Burlesca Ostinato, a central Sarabande loaded with ruminating calm, a fleeting Scherzo, and a final March and Reprise whose jaunty opening bars could so easily have passed as the pawky soundtrack to an Ealing comedy. 

The rest of the programme remained with Vaughan Williams but without the youngsters, now seated as observers in the choir balcony. First up was, as Classic FM would have it, everyone’s favourite VW, The Lark Ascending. Even for doubters, this was an enlightening and refreshing performance, thanks to the innate musicality of violin soloist, SCO leader Stephanie Gonley. There was nothing pressurised in her languid vision of the work, just a natural response to its poetic essence. Manze obliged accordingly, colouring its luscious orchestral textures in pastel shades, but not without reference to unexpected detail. I can’t recall ever noticing the triangle’s pertinent presence before.

In the Fifth Symphony, its flowing persona at odds with its composition during World War II, Manze’s attention to detail was again a compelling feature. Against an overriding effortlessness, driven also by the modal fluidity of Vaughan Williams’ writing, the Prelude was intensified by Manze emphasising its harmonic juxtapositions, and the Scherzo bristled with spiralling, at times ephemeral, impatience. In the Romanza, with its heart-tugging cor anglais solo, time stood magically still, before the final contentment of the Passacaglia finale and the quiet fulfilment of its closing bars.

Manze is an inspired addition to an already powerful SCO artistic team. Only good can come of it, surely.

Ken Walton

(Photo: Christopher Bowen)

This performance was recorded for the BBC’s Radio 3 in Concert Series, due for broadcast on 11 June.

BBC SSO / Scott of the Antarctic

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BBC SSO / Scott of the Antarctic

City Halls, Glasgow

Whatever the modern viewer might think of Ealing Studios’ 1949 adventure film Scott of the Antarctic, with its Boys Own derring-do and plucky stiff-upper-lip, it’s worth remembering it was a child of its time.

It was Ealing’s first colour movie, scripted in the wake of the Second Word War, with the clipped lines of Sir John Mills as the quintessential “English” hero alongside such notable other castings as Kenneth More, Derek Bond and James Robertson Justice, even early sightings of a certain Christopher Lee and Dandy Nichols. Directed by Charles Fend, it recounted the bittersweet fortunes of of Scott’s tragic 1910-12 expedition, which in the 1940s would still have been fresh for the telling. And it did so with some spectacular camera work.

What we shouldn’t forget is the brilliantly moody and emotive film score composed by Vaughan Williams – especially this year when the musical world has been celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth – and that was the purpose of this wonderfully fluent “Live in Concert” screening featuring the BBC SSO, the women of the Glasgow Chamber Choir and soprano Katie Coventry, under the baton of the super-efficient Martyn Brabbins.

That it coincided with the anniversary was, it should be said, an accident of circumstances. The original intention by the event production company Big Screen Live and its creator Tommy Pearson, working with global film production company StudioCanal, was to stage it in 2020, but Covid put paid to that. Pearson masterminded the preparation of the film, overseeing the excision of the music from the original soundtrack, not an easy task, he explained, given that the score didn’t exist – as is the case nowadays – on a separate track from the spoken dialogue.

A sure sign of success in such ventures – where the orchestra performs in real time to the projected film – is when the orchestra’s physical presence gets forgotten. So smooth was Brabbins’ engineering of its entries and exits that it simply felt like a regular night at the movies, but with the musical dimension infinitely more visceral, and rather refreshingly no mass exodus as the credits rolled! 

The eeriness of the wordless female voices, over which Katie Coventry (a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Elizabeth Watts) cast her own siren-like descant, possessed a haunting, palpable otherworldliness. Vaughan Williams’ bold harmonies and uncompromising orchestral textures played on equal terms with the film’s awesomely crisp snow-filled camera work. And how that slowly ascending motif, appearing over and over again, matched the arduous but doomed march for survival of Scott’s diminishing team. Its ominous inexorability took on a life and soul of its own in this illuminating context.

Pearson, in his opening introduction, also explained that music originally discarded from the final edit had been judiciously reinstated for this performance, but more intriguingly that he had also created a concert prelude out of Vaughan Williams’ used and unused material. It proved an added fascination, rather like the film outtakes you get these days on a modern DVD, but as a foretaste rather than a tail-end curiosity. 

It also reminded us that Vaughan Williams later made his own full capital from the ideas, when he incorporated many of them in his “Antarctic” Symphony, completed in 1952. 

Ken Walton

Bannatyne-Scott / Songs of Stevenson

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(BBS)
The fun side to Songs of Stevenson, produced and performed by Scots bass Brian Bannatyne-Scott, is in working out the myriad interconnections implicit within its programming. 

There’s the folksong inspiration common to contemporaneous composers Francis George Scott (1880 -1958) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958); the shared friendship and collaborations between Scott, composer Ronald Stevenson (1928 – 2015) and the radical Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid; the progressive Scots musical lineage that seeps from Scott’s earnest passion for a national song style into Stevenson’s charismatic bravado; and of course, the shared surname of the latter and his literary namesake Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS).

There’s even, in the very opening track, an instant foretaste of Vaughan Williams in Stevenson’s Blows the Wind Today, the first in his 4-song cycle of RLS settings, Hills of Home. Echoing the same modal pastoralism as Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which end the disc, an inherent symmetry is consciously or unconsciously established.

But beyond that first song, its piano imagery delicately and highlighting such poignant lines as “the peewees are crying”, Stevenson releases his fuller, freer personality. A more modernist raw astringency imbues In the Highlands; I saw Rain Falling is terse and turbulent; and finally Requiem, with its extreme vocal demands, opens the floodgates to expressive liberation. 

The reverberating heat of Bannatyne-Scott’s bass voice and the care with which he applies expressive lyrical charm is matched by pianist Jan Waterfield’s coloristic empathy. 

Composed a year after Hills of Home in 1977, Songs from Factories and Fields (words by McDiarmid and the composer himself), present a coarser, earthier side of Stevenson. Written for, but apparently never performed by, the late Scots bass Bill McCue, these are gritty and real, no doubt arising from the fact that McCue, himself, began life as a miner. Black in the Pit, the opening song, is an instant illustration. And there’s a striking echo of McCue’s doughty personality in Bannatyne-Scott’s swarthy performance. 

Providing a bridge between these two cycles are three songs by Scott. They inhabit a simpler, couthier sound world, at least to start with, but that is their charm. Scott’s lyrical eloquence dominates the vocal writing, but one by one they throw up unexpected surprises. After the comforting predictability of Reid E’en, the sensitively charged piano writing adds weight to the lugubrious The Old Fisherman. But the ultimate surprise is The Eemis Stone, its eerie opening chimes reflective of more daring imagery to follow, and an ending as brazenly laconic as Schoenberg.

Bannatyne-Scott ends with the Vaughan Williams songs – again to words by RLS – taken from a live 2003 performance with pianist Alan Jacques. As always, their easeful charm is their strength.
Ken Walton