On paper, it was a curious programme: Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, followed post-interval by Adès’s Märchentänze and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. A calculated mix of more and less familiar works, certainly – but an otherwise unlikely foursome. The common preoccupations with folk music (threaded jauntily through the Tippett and the Adès) and the natural world (VW’s lark, Sibelius’s swans) only take us so far. In practice, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance under its chief conductor Mark Wigglesworth revealed a shared creative tussle with existing musical forms and with finding new means of expression without breaking entirely with the old ways.
The Lark Ascending thus abandoned the Smooth Classics at Seven-mode for a covered, sometimes icy sound in the BSO’s world-class strings and a more risk-taking, more improvisatory approach from soloist Anthony Marwood. The tone of his Stradivarius was expensively sweet and his cool, no-vibrato opening compelling, though his performance was marred by intonation problems. Marwood fared better in Adès’s Märchentänze, which reworks folk tunes with unexpected timbral combinations and harmonies, and where the solo line tangles deliciously with the orchestra’s violins. But this work, written for the ultra-charismatic violinist Pekka Kuusisto, was rather less interesting without such a compelling soloist.
