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November 14, 2016 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Orchestra of The Swan, Review.

Orchestra of the Swan
Stratford ArtsHouse
8 November

In the past when Orchestra of the Swan has featured a newly commissioned work the audience has stayed away in droves. Not so in this 21st Anniversary year, mainly because of the imaginative way in which the new work has been introduced. At each of the concerts a newly commissioned work will be paired with a familiar classic, on this occasion Douglas J Cuomo’s Objects in Mirror with JS Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto no2 in F major which formed Cuomo’s inspiration for his new work. David Curtis made this new work accessible for the audience by having the orchestra play very short extracts of the Bach followed by short extracts of the Cuomo in order to show how Cuomo used some of Bach’s ideas and motifs, thereby helping the audience to find ways of listening to and accessing this new work. Brilliant. Particularly as the last two works on the programme were Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto no3 in G major followed by Stravinsky’s Concert for E flat for chamber Orchestra ‘Dumbarton Oaks’, a tribute to Bach’s work.
The programme began with Steve Martland’s arrangement of JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, an extraordinary arrangement which captured some of the ways in which Bach prefigures dynamic shifts and emphatic moments of contemporary rock music.
The harpsicord is barely audible in most Baroque music but Cuomo gives it real character and moments to itself so that for a change we could admire David Ponsford’s skilled playing and interactions with other instruments. I loved the intense and passionate second movement, the Ballad, where Cuomo showed he was not frightened to create slow delicacy, epitomised by Hugh Davies’s lovely playing of the muted trumpet.
Bach’s decision to have three violins rather than the customary division between first and second violins in Brandenberg 3 gave the audience quite a different string ensemble sound with just the four string lines rather than the customary five. And who said that minimalism was a twentieth century phenomenon? The two chord second movement must have been as startling to eighteenth century audiences as it was to us on Tuesday.
What a wonderful concert it was. I can’t wait for the next one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bach, Brandenberg concerto, Classical music, Classical music Stratford upon Avon. David Curtis, Orchestra of the Swan, review

June 4, 2015 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Orchestra of the Swan, review from May 29th concert. Sonnets.

Last Friday’s concert featured a hugely popular piece, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, and four pieces of contemporary music.

Conductor David Curtis brought out all the surging grandeur of the opening movement and held nothing back to depict the gallumphing cellos and basses pretending to be delicate and restrained. The distinct moods of all four string instruments was deftly captured throughout the piece, particularly in the third movement which always reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s ‘glowed into words and then would be savagely still’ from The Waste Land. In this movement there is a quest to see if stillness can be found which is other than savage. Recourse to jolliness is Tchaikovsky’s first suggestion. The second is extreme introspection and the third a distraction created by a completely different tone and mood. Curtis made this last interestingly strident and rather manic. In this performance there were moments of lyrical beauty but pervasive restlessness was the key mood. At the end, despite all the exploration, despite all the searching for alternatives, we are in the same place as the opening melody is restated. It was a fine and stimulating interpretation.

After this came Shakespeare’s Sonnet No 115 written by Kristina Arakelyan for orchestra and soprano two years ago when she was eighteen, the piece which won the Shakespeare 400 Orchestra of the Swan composition award in 2014. The American soprano April Frederick’s very expressive mood creating and word colouring, together with beautifully controlled sustained long notes gave a good performance but I’m afraid Stratford ArtsHouse is wickedly unkind to solo voices. However skilled the projection and diction you are lucky to decipher a word unless you are sitting in the front row.

My favourite piece was Huw Watkins’s three minute Envoi for strings, the epilogue to his stint as resident composer to Orchestra of the Swan. Watkins’s haunting melody and sparseness make you concentrate on every moment, giving lots of time and space to reflect. As so often with World Premieres such as this I wish that the Orchestra would play it more than once. Although it’s very brief there is a lot to take in and a second hearing, perhaps at the end of the programme, would very much have enhanced the pleasure of the concert.

The other piece was a major work by Dobrinka Tabakova oddly called Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, a setting for soprano of three poems (none of them sonnets) from The Passionate Pilgrim. Tabakova traced the mood of the poems beautifully, but I was left wondering whether I might have enjoyed it more reading the poems (helpfully printed in the programme) and just listening to the orchestra. I wasn’t convinced that the use of a soloist enhanced the piece and I didn’t feel that the Orchestra was accompanying the soloist; Tabakova appeared to me to be making them do two different things.

 

Peter Buckroyd

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Classical music, Orchestra of the Swan, reviews, shakespeare, Sonnets, William Shakespeare

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