The first performance of Freya Waley-Cohen’s ambitious Mother Tongue, commissioned by the London Philharmonic, was the centrepiece of the orchestra’s concert with its principal conductor Edward Gardner. But many of the near-capacity Festival Hall audience were not there for the premiere, but to hear Vikingur Ólafsson as soloist in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 1. There were a significant number of empty seats after the interval, but those who left missed not only Waley-Cohen’s attractive 25-minute piece but also a ferocious performance of the suite from Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin ballet, which was driven to a suitably supercharged climax by Gardner.
Whether the 50 minutes of Ólafsson’s Brahms, including an encore (his own arrangement of an Icelandic song), provided good value for money for those who did not stay is hard to say. The concerto’s Adagio unfolded with the rapt clarity that has characterised his acclaimed Bach playing in concert and on disc, but elsewhere the performance was an odd mix of the fussy and the perfunctory – fussy in the treatment of themes in the opening movement, which were interrupted by tiny expressive “commas”, or by unexpected details suddenly thrust into prominence; perfunctory in the fierce, take-it-or-leave-it way in which some passages were dispatched, especially in the finale, where the ma non troppo qualification to its Allegro marking was ignored.
Every new piece by Waley-Cohen seems to come with a rich, allusive hinterland, and Mother Tongue is no exception. It starts from the idea that “a language holds all the history and culture of its people, and can be seen as an ancestral or even parental figure”, she says, though despite her explanations it is sometimes hard to see how the consequences of this concept translate into the four busy sections of her orchestral score. In the outer parts especially there is lots of frantic activity, a multicoloured wildness that is often thrilling, but there are also moments when the music seems to hang fire or retrace its steps; it’s never quite as tightly focused as it might be.
• Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 6 January.
