A SOARING SEAGULL AND NIELSEN’S TERRIFYING TIMPANI
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
Never judge a musical work by its literary inspiration. Nearly fifty operas are based on Shakespeare plays and nearly all are duds while Puccini’s tuneful triumphs derive from penny dreadful potboilers. This maxim meant that I ignored a pang of doubt when discovering that the British composer Adrian Sutton’s violin concerto, premiered in 2023, was inspired by Richard Bach’s 1972 fable ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. Gulls enjoy noisily circling rubbish dumps and stealing chips from holidaymakers at the seaside. Bach’s anthropomorphic gull is on a transcendental quest of self-realization. Millions of Americans bought it – the definition of gullible. It was just the image of the soaring bird that really mattered to Sutton and was the starting point for the work commissioned by violinist Fenella Humphreys. The three sections of its twenty-five minute span flow seamlessly into each other, surging, soaring and dipping. Humphreys didn’t so much play the work as embody it. It’s a demanding piece for the soloist. It doesn’t require fiendishly difficult virtuoso bowing and fingering but the Humphreys played for almost every second occasionally allowed a breather while riding the thermal currents provided by the orchestra. There’s an orchestral eruption, the equivalent of hitting an air pocket, to remind us that flying is not that easy. The second section ‘Far Cliffs’ is largely serene, and sags a little, but Sutton ensured that in the third section ‘Life Force’ violin and orchestra unite in a bravura triumphant climax and Humphreys’ ovations were merited. Sutton’s concerto is a sibling to Vaughan Williams’ ‘Lark Ascending’ and if less memorable is very enjoyable.
Michael Seal was the ideal conductor for he and Humphreys have recorded the concerto for the Chandos label which also features the work which brought Sutton recognition, the music he provided for the hugely successful stage play ‘War Horse’. The fifteen minute Suite has six sections charting the friendship of Albert and his horse Joey, their separation when Joey is sent to the front line in World War I and their eventual reunion. Sutton’s musical depiction is vivid and colourful, opening with the bucolic ‘Devon at Peace’, a melancholy distant trumpet and Oliver Janes’ clarinet notable contributions, brass and timpani off the leash as battle erupts in ‘The Charge’ and a quietly fulfilling reconciliation.
I spent four years studying and writing a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Schopenhauer, a life-changing experience. If tackling his magnum opus, 1,400 pages in two volumes of metaphysics, is too daunting, here's a shortcut – listen to Nielsen’s Symphony No.4 ‘The Inextinguishable’. In just 35 minutes of amazing music Nielsen lets us listen to the principle which powers existence, what Dylan Thomas called, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower...that drives the water through the rocks.” The composer said his aim was to, “dip right down to the layers of the emotional life that are still half-chaotic and wholly elementary”, and he does just that. Seal and the CBSO got the balance just right – musically embodied raging chaos tamed by form. Nielsen stages a battle in the fourth and final movement between two timpanists, here antiphonally divided left and right, hurling out challenges to each other reducing the rest of the orchestra to the role of troops in Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ – “Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them … Volley’d and Thunder’d. Tremendous stuff!
Norman Stinchcombe