Anthony Davis (born 1951, New Jersey)
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
S-composers fore and aft, Stravinsky’s Nightingale made an explosive opening (a trombone glissando brought out), the Emperor’s court bustling, the music-making vivid and precise, rhythms crisp, character- and scenario-defining, the titular birds, one real, the other mechanical, the latter entrancing the Emperor (to the chagrin of the genuine one, although it will return to heal the sovereign), Sakari Oramo and the BBCSO equally entrancing your correspondent through their relishing the (chamber, subtle, expressive) orchestration and its capacity to illuminate a strange storyline, soloists rising to the occasion, not least flute and trumpet. Rounding the evening, Till Eulenspiegel and his lustige Streiche in a closely observed account, alive equally to mercurial musical incident and the scoundrel’s shenanigans, Richard Strauss the cartoonist.
If nothing else, Anthony Davis’s Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey is an eye-catching title, about a monkey outwitting a predatory lion, although musically it’s somewhat more than that, third-stream jazzy, reminding of Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. It’s taken nearly thirty years for Davis’s likeable piece to reach the UK, this European premiere very persuasive, although I don’t think it reached the stated fifteen minutes
Following Stravinsky, Augustin Hadelich gave an energetic, if poised, and sweetly lyrical, account of Mendelssohn’s evergreen ‘second’ Violin Concerto – flexible, dynamic, colourful – explorative of the cadenza, athletic bowing to end the movement with room to accelerate (but this wasn’t show-off playing), then a heartfelt Andante, collective enquiring of the music’s potential, Hadelich so tender in the concluding bars, and a final movement that belied the quick pace through deftly remaining shapely and ardent. For an encore I would have bet on Hadelich offering Orange Blossom Special by Ervin T. Rouse or Louisiana Blues Strut by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, regular extras; I would have lost my stake, he played his own arrangement of a tango.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002ftx9