Judith Weir’s Begin Afresh, premiered by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in their latest Prom, is a reflection on trees. Or rather, it is a musical expression of the forces within trees, and what they evoke as the cycle of the seasons change.
Though trees themselves are necessarily static, Weir’s three-movement score is anything but. It ripples sinuously in the spring, with almost a concertante role for lead violin Igor Yuzefovich, pulses mysteriously in the autumn, and is full of mostly quiet activity even in midwinter. Begin Afresh, a title drawn from Philip Larkin, is delicately scored and its ideas are always evolving in a recognisably traditional way. It even gets a bit Tolkienesque at times, with piano and brass conjuring passages that sounded distinctly like music for ents. Oramo and his players did it all proud.
