BBCSSO, 10/11/2016

Tippett : Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage
Britten : Violin Concerto (Daniel Hope, violin)
Dvorák : Symphony No. 6

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgaard

Tippett's first major opera was The Midsummer Marriage, created in 1955, and usually considered as the most accessible of his five operas.  The Ritual Dances, extracted from the opera in response to a commission from Paul Sacher, and first performed in concert a couple of years before the premiere of the full opera, are an opulent orchestral score, the four dances played without a break, and with a unifying bridging passage between them, so you more or less get a large-scale rondo, that concludes on an enigmatic note.  It's lush music, heady and perfumed, surprising for the period, but attractive, and well played here.

Britten and Tippett are often mentioned in the same breath, but Britten, eight years younger, was frankly precocious compared to Tippett, who was a cautious, not to say slow developer.  Britten, on the other hand, was turning out music in a startling variety of forms before he even left school.  The Violin Concerto dates from his American years, he was in his mid-to-late twenties, and despite some very promising earlier works, this is not, at least at first, one of the pieces in which his true voice can be heard all that clearly.

The first movement's lyricism is somewhat reminiscent of the Barber concerto, which was more or less contemporary, while the Scherzo can easily be mistaken for Prokofiev - I still do, if I hear it out of context.  It's not until the last movement, the Passacaglia, that you start to hear echoes of what Britten was to become, particularly in the last variations.  If some of the very highest notes of Daniel Hope's violin were not quite as clear and steady as I would have liked, on the whole, the intensity of the performance largely made up for that, and the balance with the orchestra was excellent, always bringing the soloist into and out of focus just as required.

While Dvorák's 7th, 8th and 9th Symphonies have a well entrenched position on our concert platforms, the previous six are much less well-exposed.  I have a fleeting acquaintance with the 5th and 6th, and none at all with 1 to 4, so a performance of the 6th was of particular interest,  I think it's the first time I've ever heard the piece complete, much less live.  However, it's clear enough why the last three symphonies are so much preferred.  If the melodic material is pure Dvorák, its development lies under the heavy shadow of Brahms, and there's still a hint of academic formalism in some passages.

Where Dvorák's own voice really stands out is in the Scherzo, in the fast, stamping rhythm of the furiant, unabashedly and wholeheartedly Czech in inspiration.  Dausgaard and the orchestra gave a vivid, unstintingly generous performance of the piece, with a rich, warm sound and a strong, forward pulse that carried it through its drier patches while enjoying its more rewarding elements.

[Next : 11th November]