Bavouzet, BBCSO, Stasevska, Barbican review - ardent souls in mythic magic

Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska gave a supercharged triple whammy of masterpieces. They even had a pianist to match the Budapesters’ Igor Levit, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. He seemed as delighted with Stasevska and the players as they were with him; the post-performance embraces spoke volumes about communicative kindred spirits.

Was it worth assembling a full BBC Symphony Chorus and two soloists as well as large orchestra for the first 18 minutes? Absolutely. Bartók's nearest companion-piece to Bluebeard's Castle, the Cantata Profana of 1930, is lean and compelling as it revisits an old Romanian ballad of a father who finds his nine hunting sons transformed into stags, and fails to persuade them to come home with him ("look at our antlers," sings the best-beloved son/stag, "wider than your doorway"). If memory serves me right, the last time I heard this utterly original work live was with Boulez conducting the same BBC Symphony Orchestra (though it wouldn't have been their Prom of 1963 - I wasn't that precocious a one-year-old).

The forest mystery was well set up by the orchestra, even if one didn't catch any of the choral words until the crucial transformation, marked by dizzying harp figures. It was bold to give the part of the son to Robin Tritschler: it seems to demand an heroic tenor in its strenuous upper reaches, but Tritschler's lyric voice cut like a knife, just right for the strangeness of the role. And we had a tried and tested Bluebeard, Miklós Sebestyén, as the sorrowing father. Stasevska gave the hunt-music and the epilogue all the dynamism they needed. As she did the more driven parts of Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which also begins in mystery, here in the very depths of the orchestra. As in Hrůša's stunning Shostakovich Eleventh Symphony with the orchestra last month, soloists - here contrabassoonist Steven Magee, bassoonist Julie Price and trombonist Helen Vollam - reminded us that the BBCSO's wind and brass sections are second to none. 

In the extraordinarily resonant piano part, written for Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in the First World War, Bavouzet (pictured above by Benjamin Ealovega) thundered the depths in response to the fullest orchestral climax, spread stardust on the passages of lyrical warmth and gave as good as he got from his bluesy fellow-instrumentalists in the astonishing stomp that changes the course of the work. The encore gave us a brief emotional respite in the 1913 Prélude before adding to it the Toccata from Le tombeau de Couperin; I don't know the precedent for this, but it worked superbly. 

Likewise the blaze of 13 brass players and timpani which fanfare an even stranger fantasy in Janáček's Sinfonietta. Could this unceasing pageant of bizarre and taxing instrumentation take a less driven view than Stasevska's? I don't think so - the manic quality is built in to the greater part of the score - but it could do with more space, more give, around it than the Barbican allows; the Royal Albert Hall would suit the trumpeters, if not every selective sound in the work. At any rate, with clarinets squealing vocally, Stasevska provided more of an electric charge in the build towards the return of the fanfares than I've heard from any other conductor. If she could single-handedly win the war for the country of her birth, Ukraine, this is the way she'd do it.

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