There was a welcome adventurousness about this programme of new music given by the BBC National Orchestra under the baton of Gemma New, with two UK premieres and the first performance in his native Wales of Huw Watkins’s Second Symphony.
Jessie Montgomery’s 2017 score Coincident Dances has in one respect already fulfilled its brief, in being choreographed for a spring performance by Miami City Ballet. Opening with an unusual double bass solo, its subsequent fusion of English consort music, samba, Ghanaian mbira, swing and techno was intriguing, occasionally leaping vividly into life – as in Philippe Schartz’s clarion trumpet call – and with a touch of Bernstein, if not quite the chutzpah.
Fantasie im Wintergarten is the title of Uzbekistani-Australian Elena Kats-Chernin’s violin concerto, inspired by the melodrama of a German silent cinema classic, Varieté, and the vaudeville atmosphere of Berlin’s Wintergarten it portrayed. Parodying the various elements of this setting, Kats-Chernin’s concerto is an extravaganza of filmic twists and turns, romance and tragedy, with soloist Emily Sun – for whom it was written – carrying off the virtuoso writing with flair. Some of it was fun and quirky but ultimately it was overwrought and, at half an hour, overlong. Sun’s encore, Matthew Hindson’s The Big 5–0 for solo violin, delivered as much, if not more, in just three minutes.
The second half brought Watkins’s Second Symphony, a work of fundamental musical integrity that combines lyricism with grit. Co-commissioned by BBCNOW and the Hallé Orchestra and premiered by the latter in 2021, it owes some of its nature to having been conceived during the pandemic, demanding of the composer a reflective but buoyant positivity. Cast in three movements, there is nothing unconventional either in its fabric or structure, but Watkins’s instinctive gift is to craft material that engages the ear and, equally, to fashion absorbing arguments in which tensions are created, dissipated and reignited. The striking oboe solos and characteristic flute lines imprinted themselves most on the consciousness, fluid and beguiling, but everything about the meticulously coloured orchestration was delivered by the players with a strong sense of ownership – Watkins was previously the BBCNOW’s composer-in-association.
New conducted with grace and discipline, and it was the underlying driving momentum, present throughout, that finally propelled the symphony towards what Watkins had felt as a necessary “upward rush of optimism”. It certainly lifted the spirits.
