Celebrating Darrell Davison's 30 years with SSO
This special concert featured Darrell Davison as composer in his Cello Concerto and as a communicator with his special presentation of Elgar's Enigma Variations. Thank you to John Hendry for the following review of the afternoon's music. The programme can be found here.
Darrell must have been having several sorts of kittens when the snow started appearing as a reality not just a forecast; despite some resultant unfilled seats there was a good sized audience in the STAG for his 30th anniversary with the SSO. An interesting concert, and a good title.
Kodaly’s Hary Janos is the tale of a boastful man – a ludicrously overblown self-portrait. Music can do caricature well, Kodaly got it just right, and the SSO took the material and ran with it. There was plenty of colour in their interpretation, and some swagger despite a couple of tentative moments of edgy ensemble. The audience thoroughly enjoyed the familiar tunes and the characterful playing, the Battle and Defeat particularly providing a fine musical picture to rival those mid-C19th portraits of the defeated Napoleon.
Darrell Davison’s Elegiac Portraits for Cello and orchestra was the centrepiece of the programme. It would have been so easy for a composer to produce caricatures of larger than life characters such as Tortelier or du Pre – there was no suggestion of that, this was a really carefully researched and thought out project. Having been able to hear some rehearsal [without the cello] and read the full notes and I wondered if it was going to be rather a patchwork or collage of a piece but I found the solo part provided the thread that carried the musical sense through between sometimes very short sections. Once clued into this it was great to admire the textures, sonorities and structural devices that informed and coloured each musical picture. Jérémie Maillard clearly knows the piece well having now performed it three times, his performance had all the assurance and virtuosity one would expect in a piece commemorating four great cellists. I wondered if in the outer movements an extrovert showmanship in the style of delivery might have engaged the audience and portrayed the instrumentalists [Casals and Tortelier] even more effectively – but that’s a tough ask with such challenging music to play. The third movement, Anita Lasker, seemed to be the most intense and personal movement for both composer and audience – its uncompromising use of symbolism from the Jewish liturgy created moments of terror and bleakness that were deeply affecting. The orchestra seemed to deliver all that was required from a complex and demanding score – only the composer can tell us whether his vision was fully realised but to the audience it came across as an important and involving work.
Delius’ La Calinda is a picture of sunnier times and climes than November in west Kent and was an appropriate light appetiser to the main dish of the second half. Elgar introducing the Enigma Variations was a great idea. David Leonard used a believable Edwardian delivery in the brief introductions to “my friends pictured within” – and displaying photographic representations on a classroom easel got the atmosphere nicely. As one audience member remarked to me afterwards ‘it was like a children’s concert for grown-ups’. The orchestra really enjoyed themselves in this and despite the chopping of a usually continuous score into fourteen sections kept a great sense of flow and continuity. Every orchestral section produced some really superb moments. Right from the statement of the theme the string sound was rich, sonorous, all you could wish for, and when we got to Nimrod ….what a gorgeous start. Elgar in his orchestration tends to include horns as part of the wind quintet; the wind solos and, just as crucially, the detailing, really delighted – and they listen to each other so the blend was impeccable. The heavier brass are saved for the more grandiose moments and it was good to feel they were not overplaying their hand; they added gravitas without the stridency one is increasingly hearing from brass sections. A really lovely performance all round and a great testament to the orchestra, and to Darrell’s thirty years.
