Jeremy Bentham’s axiom, “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”, was invoked in this first of two BBC National Orchestra of Wales Great Brits concerts, featuring composers who ostensibly have rebelled against tradition. David Sawer’s The Greatest Happiness Principle specifically references Bentham and his brother Samuel’s Panopticon, and the work’s bright and tight flow, with its darker, mischievous final sting of organised orchestral mayhem, seemed as fresh as when BBCNOW premiered it two decades ago.
Conductor Clark Rundell brought an expansive richness to the string processionals of Howard Skempton’s Lento, conceived as a companion to Wagner’s Prelude to Parsifal. Ironic then that the strings, albeit now fewer, were rather overindulged in Michael Nyman’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings. Soloist Mahan Esfahani’s ebullient ostinati will doubtless emerge more clearly in the future broadcast; here it was the expressiveness he brought to the poignant tango episode which stood out.
The rhythms of Charlie Barber’s Shut Up and Dance found the vibraphone and marimba players grooving through their solo lines; in turn they served to underline the gently waltzing lullaby aura of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars. The quality of the old man’s recorded voice never fails to be haunting, the more so as it faded out against the high divisi violins suggesting Lohengrin and the Holy Grail, linking us back to the Skempton. All the composers, bar Nyman, were present, adding to the feelgood factor.
