Two days before this often remarkable concert, the BBC Philharmonic announced Omer Meir Wellber’s appointment as its new chief conductor from the start of the 2019 season. To date, Wellber is best known in the UK for his work with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and at Glyndebourne, where his interpretation of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly made a huge impression earlier this year. He has, however, also been conducting the BBC Philharmonic since March, both in the orchestra’s Salford studio and its concert series in Leeds, and has, it would seem, already forged a remarkably strong relationship with his players, who respond to him with tremendous enthusiasm and commitment.
He opened the evening with an elegant yet energetic performance of Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony (No 36 in C Major, K 425). The first movement blended nobility with warmth, while the finale was all exuberant grace and dexterity. The bittersweet Andante, however, with its sombre orchestration and ambiguous shifts from major to minor, formed the fulcrum around which Wellber’s interpretation swung. Poise and emotion were held in faultless balance here. It was exceptionally beautiful.
After the interval came a powerhouse performance of Act I of Wagner’s Die Walküre. Wellber established the high emotional pitch at the outset with a spine-tingling account of the storm, rarely relaxing the tension as the subsequent drama unfolded, yet all the while attentive to musical detail and psychological subtlety. There was real menace in the brass at Hunding’s arrival, and the love scenes were all fierce sensuality, their “furious ardour”, as Wagner puts it in his stage directions, wonderfully realised.
Brindley Sherratt made a truly ferocious Hunding, but as Siegmund and Sigelinde, Robert Dean Smith and Christiane Libor were perhaps less than ideally matched. Libor sang with unswerving intensity. Dean Smith, clean and clear, was altogether more detached, though his cries of “Wälse! Wälse!” seemed to go on effortlessly for ever.
Even so, this was thrilling stuff, marking the start of what promises to be a most exciting partnership between the BBC Philharmonic and its new conductor.
