Doreen Carwithen’s concerto for piano and strings is emerging blinking into the light from half a century of oblivion, and one suspects that the return to life has further to go. Premiered at the 1952 Proms, when it was the only music by any female composer that season, the concerto languished until after Carwithen’s death in 2003. Now the 30-minute piece has been recorded twice, received its German premiere last month, and, in the latest step in its reawakening, was the centrepiece of the latest Barbican Hall concert by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Carwithen’s champions, who include the soloist in both this and the German performances, Alexandra Dariescu, make large claims for concerto and composer alike. Despite Dariescu’s unstinting performance, however, Carwithen’s piece does not entirely justify them. The concerto is accomplished for sure, with neatly crafted moods veering between late romantic and neo-classical, but more is hinted at than is achieved, even in the intimacy between the piano and a solo violin in the slow movement. The closest the concerto comes to a crux or a moment of revelation is in the thundering solo cadenza in the final movement.
It took only a few bars of Malcolm Arnold’s fifth symphony, which took up the second half of the concert, to encounter the colour and incisiveness missing from the Carwithen. Arnold’s writing memorialises four friends who had all recently died when the symphony was written in 1961. There is undoubtedly darkness in the scoring but, for the most part, the symphony brims with contrast and confidence. There is a serenity in the slow movement and a jauntiness in the two that follow that make a strong case for treating this as Arnold’s most successful orchestral work. Oramo has long been a committed advocate of it, which this performance confirmed, and he brandished the score for its own round of applause at the end.
Right at the start of the evening, the BBC Singers joined Oramo and the orchestra for a ravishing performance of Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music . The setting of part of the scene between Lorenzo and Jessica in act five of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is one of Vaughan Williams’ most transcendent achievements. In today’s grim times it poured even more balm than usual into the soul.
