The centrepiece of Gianandrea Noseda’s latest London Symphony Orchestra concert was the UK premiere of Sally Beamish’s Distans, a concerto for violin and clarinet, written for Janine Jansen and Martin Fröst, who gave the first performance in Sweden in 2021 and also played it here. It’s a bittersweet work about the relationship between memory and emotional closeness in times of separation or isolation, and was written during the 2020 lockdown, when Beamish was separated from many of her family. The concerto also reflects on her attachment to Scotland – her home for many years – and forges a synthesis between medieval Dutch music and Scandinavian folk, in acknowledgment of Jansen’s and Fröst’s nationalities respectively.
It opens with the soloists off stage, calling to each across a vast space, conveyed in Mahlerian fashion by static harmonies in brass and strings, before they arrive on the platform to usher in the energetic first movement, its driving rhythms, skirling figurations and tricky double cadenzas echoing traditional Swedish and Scottish dances. In the finale, the process is reversed as marches derived from a Dutch troubadour’s song ambiguously promise reunions and renewal, but eventually recede back into the distance as the soloists leave the auditorium. The emotional kernel, however, comes in the central slow movement, which finds Beamish at her best and most persuasive, as unisons pull apart and re-form, and closely woven solo lines overlap with a dissonant beauty reminiscent of Monteverdi. Beamish’s solo writing is nothing if not exacting: Jansen and Fröst sounded virtuosic and exquisite throughout. Noseda, meanwhile, conducted with considerable intensity and attention to detail.
Its carefully chosen companion pieces in some respects reflected its preoccupations: Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No 3 deals with reunion after separation and isolation; Prokofiev’s bittersweet Seventh Symphony, his last, is often construed as a work about memory in its recollections of youth in middle age. Noseda’s Beethoven was lean and taut, rather than lofty and epic, the final perforation thrilling in its elation and elan. And he beautifully captured the pervasive sadness of the Prokofiev in a great, deeply felt interpretation that was all the more affecting for its avoidance of sentimentality.
