THE BBC SSO yesterday launched its new season of Afternoon Performances with a top-flight programme that drew a big crowd, pretty much confirming what we have been considering for a while: the daytime series which began from zero when the newly refurbished City Halls opened has grown arms, legs, an audience and has become something of a cache in its short lifetime.
Yesterday's opening concert, with conductor Andrew Manze, new SSO leader Laura Samuel leading firmly from the front, and soloist Nicholas Daniel, one of the greatest oboists of our time, was stuffed with glories.
Manze's meaty, closing account of Schubert's immense Ninth Symphony might have been a bit rough and ready for some tastes, in matters of polish, refinement and elements of orchestral balance. It was breathtaking though, with its success based on two major factors: the conductor never let it drag – rather he drove it with unflagging energy – and the SSO got the bit between their teeth and went with it. It was like an exhilarating blast of wind in the face, while the finale, hair-raisingly, took off like a greyhound. The stamina of the players was deeply impressive.
The concert had opened with George Butterworth's utterly gorgeous Shropshire Lad Rhapsody, no mere piece of English Pastoralism but an impassioned, intense and searing little tone poem whose brief duration embraces worlds of emotion.
And in the middle was the awesome, lip and lung-defying Nicholas Daniel (how and when does he breathe?) in an aristocratic performance of Vaughan Williams's Oboe Concerto, beguiling and languid in its atmospheres, playful and almost skittishly virtuosic in its quicker pages. Spellbinding.
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