Well-worth catching is the half-hour Concerto for Orchestra, Huw Watkins’s fourth piece (including two Symphonies) for The Hallé and Mark Elder. Impressionistic, lightly-textured, spring-day music, also richly expressive (suggesting the slow movement of Tippett’s Second Symphony) that transforms into English exuberance (reminding of John Foulds’s April – England) and laid out in such a way as to be symphonic and also befitting Watkins’s generic title. Do try and catch this impressive score of dancing clarity, delicacy, wonderment (celesta), slowly evolving Brittenesque light-on-water passages of regret that dissolve to interior thoughts, and some scintillating writing for brass.
This persuasive premiere of music that knew exactly where its first home would be (a second listen discovers further delights) was followed by an absorbing account of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (my second in less than a week, lucky me), not accident-free but then Watkins had already demanded much from the trumpets.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002cp78
June 2.