Photo, Andy Paradise

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Royal Albert Hall, London

Even the composer took against Boléro, despite it being a nice little earner, one imagines, “orchestration without music”, and his recording (one of many courtesy of numerous maestros) is slow-going and lacklustre, and not because the sound is limited, yet the work served Olympic ice-dancers Torvill & Dean to fame, and has been transcribed, arranged and disarranged for various instrumentations and nefarious reasons. When performed as writ, a carefully calibrated crescendo with solo instruments passing an engaging tune round, with a feat of start-to-finish rhythmic concentration for a side-drummer, Boléro makes for an illustrative tour of the orchestra. David Hockings (placed away from his percussion colleagues), always audible, sustained the pace that Eva Ollikainen (dotting Is, crossing Ts) set, equating to just shy of sixteen minutes, although the score’s mechanistic nature was played down, the orgiastic coda equally damped, yet the melody was attractively shaped and journeyed through the ensemble urbanely.

Edgard Varèse’s Intégrales (1923, for winds and percussion) opened the evening, a closely observed, uncompromising, account of boundary-breaking music that looks forward abrasively, with no link to the past. The Rite of Spring was already ten years old at this point, and productively seminal (Scythian Suite; Miraculous Mandarin). Ollikainen led a well-mannered account, detail-conscious, not unlike Martyn Brabbins’s three years ago at this address, if with a stronger claim on the memory than Ollikainen’s conducting of it is likely to have. The opening of The Rite found Jonathan Davies’s bassoon song-like (an aspect of this work that can be overlooked) and the impressionistic beginning to Part Two was sensitively distilled; elsewhere there was a quickness and a deliberation that didn’t quite add up, although there was no attempt to sensationalise the music (for which a brownie point), ballet shoes kept on.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Before we fall (BBC co-commission: UK premiere), a concerto for cellist Johannes Moser, suggests a powerful narrative, couched in cinematic terms from the orchestra, the cello ‘first among equals’, combative if trapped by the dense sonic surround; following a sudden break for silence, the cello seems to become a preacher, righteous, delivering a sermon, the music, now weaker, losing identity for a generalised sacredness, suggesting weather-beaten religious artefacts and ancient rituals, if with an outside threat still apparent. Despite an obviously fine UK launch, whether this twenty-five-minute piece is strong enough to sustain interest over a few more listens is uncertain, let alone be a repertoire regular after the commissioners have all had their performances – San Francisco done – must be questionable. Varèse victorious.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gr8h

Hideous soundtrack!

BBC Proms 2022 – Prom 20: Martyn Brabbins conducts Birtwistle & Xenakis, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with BBCSO; Tom Borrow plays Ravel’s G-major Piano Concerto [live BBC Radio 3 broadcast].

Many Happy Returns to Martyn Brabbins – Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Orchestra of India – 66 today. Bach/Andrew Davis, Birtwistle, Elgar, Ferneyhough, Tippett, Vaughan Williams.

Ravel’s Boléro: a serendipitous selection of fifteen performances from across the decades – from Franz André to Klaus Tennstedt (alphabetical) if arranged in a somewhat higgledy-piggledy order, and including recordings conducted by Ravel himself, Celibidache, Coppola, Martinon, Mravinsky and Felix Slatkin.