Page 490 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

building the music organically to fierce declamation without disrupting the symphonic line: a
soul trying to break free but, really, there is no way out … except, next, to throw darts at
Stalin, or at least portray him unfavourably at a deliberate instead of a breakneck speed:
menacing rather than frenzied, and musically, with an ear-catching drop to pianissimo in the
strings that suggested the subject had left the room before bursting back in. Surprise!
Enigmas abound in the third movement: the horn’s motifs sounding over a sparse
landscape, poignancies, a subito oriental dance, massed horns exulting (Brabbins expanding
here if not as much as Temirkanov’s half-tempo digressions, however thrilling) and, at the
close, a fade to nothingness that suggested anything previously seen was a mirage. The
Finale’s slow introduction brooded on questions not answered, before the Allegro hopped
skipped and jumped into a resounding assertion of the composer’s DSCH autograph; then
time to reflect before energising to jump the ultimate timpani-salvoed hurdles to conclude a
rendition at-once scrupulous and penetrating.

As the concert’s centrepiece, Laura van der Heijden gave a wonderfully communicative
account of William Walton’s Cello Concerto, a late-1950s’ commission for Piatigorsky and the
Boston Symphony, probably the least-favoured of the composer’s three string-instrument
Concertos, music that rhapsodises and romances, and suggests Mediterranean breezes, and
in which woodwind and horn solos were as distinguished as van der Heijden’s unaffected
ones, and she pulled of a coup by not rushing the second movement – time for pointing and
detailing, also an advantage for Walton’s use of the orchestra. The longest movement is the
Finale, of various episodes – which Walton termed ‘Improvisations’, threaded by a theme –
for the cello alone, and for an unleashed orchestra, music that muses, paints pictures,
exhilarates, and concludes with the sun going down, exquisitely held together here. Cellist,
conductor and ensemble displayed exemplary teamwork in this ravishing and stimulating
performance, especially compelling in the concluding, satisfied, minutes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00182c1
https://brittenpearsarts.org/whats-on/category/aldeburgh-festival