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West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge
3 November 2004
Britten Sinfonia
Joanna MacGregor piano
James MacMillan conductor
James MacMillan's second piano
concerto started life as a specially commissioned ballet score for the
New York City Ballet, where it was first performed in May. Cambridge hosted
its European premiere, without the dancers but with plenty of tapping
toes. The concerto lands in Stirling tonight and will arrive on the South
Bank in London on Monday.
This is a work of fierce physicality:
a half hour's frenzy of folk-song and dance inspired by the antics of
a 17th century zealot referred to in Edwin Muir's poem Scotland 1941.
The piano concerto is dedicated to the poet's memory.
From the whirling fantasy of
18th century Scottish dance melodies that is the first movement, Cumnock
Fair, it's clear that this is MacMillan as enfant terrible. And who better
to unleash his whimsy, his furies, his dreams and his tantrums than Joanna
MacGregor, who jigged, boogied and reeled her way through a tangle of
angualr unisons and melodic miasmas in the strings of Britten Sinfonia.
Two attempts at a little lone
cadenza of Scottish snaps, and off they went again, until a lengthy cadenza
proper rolled from one extreme end of the keyboard to another. A little
fragment of this movement's closing bars created the dying-fall motif
which is the start of Shambards, the second movement. This is a dizzying
hall of mirrirs: Burnsian folk song and fragments of the Mad Scene from
Lucia di Lammermoor drift in and out of focus. Finally, the mournful little
figure metamorphoses into a dark drumming at the bottom of the keyboard
and Shamnation, the third movement, is under way, sounding like a devilish
Strathspey Society on speed.
For sheer visceral excitement,
if not a lot more, this half-romp, half-tantrum of a work is hot stuff.
It was good to have the brow cooled after the interval by a discerning
performance of Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten -
nicely counterbalancing the Britten Prelude and Fugue which began the
concert. The wonder of a simple musical triad, diffused through a body
of strings so that they become a reverbrant chime of shifting voices,
is miraculously renewed in every performance of this work. Even when there
is less tintinnabulation than intended: the tubular bell collaposed mid-course
this time. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste came to no harm,
though, in MacMillan's vividly conducted performance of Bartok's masterwork,
artfully programmed as a glorious summation of so many of the musical
techniques glimpsed in this programme.
**** Hilary Finch, The Times
This was an evening of rhythm
par excellence, starting with the introspection of the Britten Prelude
and Fugue where the dozen-and-a-half sighing strings came straight from
wavinf Suffolk reeds, under graceful conducting from James MacMillan.
Then to the centrepiece and
with the Sinfonia (guest leader Priya Mitchell) increased by half, MacMillan's
own second piano concerto. Here was rhythm in abundance in the opening
with its delightful cameo 'folksy' sections. With an effervescent soloist
in Joanna MacGregor, this was always a dancing delight. Not spiritual
but exciting as a seemingly conventinal waltz was overtaken by overlapping
strings until the work developed its own percussive character before moving
to a repetitive jig from the violins, answered back by piano.
There was so much going on
it was difficult to assess the whole picture on first hearing and, although
I remain to be convinced of the thunderous climax, suffice it to say it
was a work full of excitement outstandingly executed. After the gentility
of Arvo Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, Bartok's Music for
Strings, Percussion and Celeste had a mysterious quality with inexorable
building of tension in another piece notable for its rhythmic qualities.
Eastern Daily Press
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