Conductor John Wilson has made a career of championing English music from the first half of the 20th century.
In this programme, British Classics, he sensibly avoided Britten (we're getting plenty anyway this centenary year) and focused on the lush, lyrical, angst-tinged sweep of the English Romantics: William Walton, Gerald Finzi, Gustav Holst and Arnold Bax.
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra responded with the kind of robust, sonorous playing they tend to apply to romantic music, and it was hard not to be seduced: beefy brass, gutsy, velvety strings, gentle, rounded winds – a sumptuous sound, although a bit too thick at times. Wilson added a chipper, bustling energy that suited Walton's Portsmouth Point overture perfectly. But he needed to find more ebb and flow in Holst's Ballet Music from The Perfect Fool and Bax's The Garden of Fand, especially at climaxes, and a wider range of moods and colours. The opening of the Holst was slow, sludgy and contained some unusually scrappy strings.
The highlight was Finzi's Cello Concerto, which – at 40 minutes – took up the bulk of the programme. This was the first time Wilson and soloist Paul Watkins had performed the piece, and Watkins attacked its dense, overwrought lines with fearless intensity. Even if the balance in the first movement wasn't right (the orchestra was too loud for the cello, despite Watkins's hearty, husky sound), it was Watkins who drove the performance. This concerto is like an English landscape under English weather: now dark and brooding, now bathed in pretty sunlight. Watkins struck an ideal balance, and even managed to make the dubiously jocund finale sound worthwhile.
HHH
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