Melancolia: Vilde Frang, Sakari Oramo and the BBCSO
Clyde, Britten and Beethoven
Vilde Frang, Sakari Oramo and BBCSO
Barbican Hall
Stalls L75, £10
21 March 2018
Barbican page
Programme:
Anna Clyne This Midnight Hour
Britten Violin Concerto
Beethoven Sixth Symphony
I like Britten’s Violin Concerto very much, in the quiet way I think warranted by the piece’s introverted solemnity. Vilde Frang’s performance was very good, true to this inner sadness, moving with the piece to a gentle plangency at its close that was almost unbearable and sweetly so.
Unfortunately to get to that I first had to sit through Anna Clyne’s mysteriously rubbish This Midnight Hour. I did no homework on Clyne’s music and it’s more than possible there’s something about her writing I’m just too ignorant to get. But coming to it cold it was difficult to find redeeming features; the dominant impression I received was of an experiment to see what happens if you take all the interesting bits out of a film score and perform the remainder.
Everyone’s on much safer ground with Beethoven’s Sixth. Oramo and the BBCSO made no attempt to reinvent the wheel but gave a straightforward and robust reading, not the tidiest I’ve heard but a rousing, cheery send-off to fight away the first half’s melancholy.
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