This was not a Prom with a light and breezy tone. Vaughan Williams’s craggy Ninth Symphony and Britten’s intense pre-war Violin Concerto were coupled with a new commission that explored violent public protest – although this new piece was less confrontational than this description might suggest. The only light to go with all this shade was found in Vaughan Williams’s luminous and timeless Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
This masterpiece opened the programme, with the opening chords and pizzicatos emerging almost imperceptibly from the strings of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. I could hear them – just – from my stall seat, but I’m not sure how much will have reached the gallery. At the other end of the scale, the grand climax of the piece seemed to lack the requisite weight of sound, despite Andrew Manze’s imploring gestures. But in between there was some lovely playing, with the subtleties of Vaughan Williams’s scoring helped by the placement of the secondary octet at the back of the stage, where their reed-like vibrato-less echoes balanced the tutti strings, and the deftly shaped solos of leader Thelma Handy.
It was interesting hearing Britten’s Violin Concerto a week after reporting on Stravinsky’s, from only a few years earlier. Britten’s spare scoring is much more helpful for the soloist, giving Simone Lamsma plenty of scope for dynamic range and exploring the drama and tension in the music. It’s a favourite piece of Lamsma’s – she first came to public attention playing it in competition in 2004 – and she clearly loves the edginess, the intensity, but also the momentary shafts of sunlight that Britten allows in. The second movement recalls Shostakovich, with delightful chuntering bassoons but it was in the extended cadenza that Lamsma really shone, her playing assertive and rhetorical.
I was a bit nervous about Carmel Smickersgill’s A Brick Thrown with Love on the basis of theslightly cringey programme note by the composer (pictured above by Chris Christodoulou), explaining how the piece explores different perspectives on an act of civil disobedience, namely the throwing of a brick. The three movements were titled “The Why”, “Construction, Compassion, Community, Consequence” and “The Voice that Says ‘Do It’” and I wish they hadn’t been, as the expectation created was for a piece of earnest agitprop. In fact the music was an engaging and well-paced orchestral triptych, showing a clear debt to Smickersgill’s mentor, the brilliant Anna Meredith.
The music had Meredith-style restless polymetres, with a mini-drumkit setting a different pulse from the rest of the orchestra. There were perky textures with motifs bounced around the ensemble, the quasi-mechanistic textures never slipping into minimalist obviousness. The gently-spiced tonal language was pleasing to the ear and well handled. The pacing of the movements was successful, in particular the last movement build-up, via a skittering groove, to a gunshot ending. Not the promised angst, and all the better for it.
Which just left Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony, which received its Proms premiere in 1958 only three weeks before the composer’s death. Its stern demeanour and fierceness shows RVW not going gentle into that good night, and the inclusion of a trio of saxes was something new in his orchestral palette. Manze, a genial, headmasterly presence on the podium, gave clear directions, and apart from a couple of untidy moments, the orchestra responded with some powerful playing. A beautiful flugelhorn solo (Tom Fountain) in the second movement was a highlight, and the third was suitably ferocious. The final moments were captivating, as the saxes, RVW’s nod to modernity, refuse to settle on the same chord as the orchestra. It’s a wonderful end to his symphonic output.
