The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra believes that its current post-lockdown summer series features the largest orchestra currently performing live in the UK. It’s not an easy claim to verify, and the full string section certainly wasn’t on stage for this matinee performance under the orchestra’s associate conductor Michael Seal. What’s clear though, is that the platform at Symphony Hall, stripped of risers and choirstalls, offers ample space for a large orchestra that’s socially distanced but doesn’t sound like it. The Hall’s pristine acoustic isn’t suited to every kind of music, but for large orchestral scores, under current circumstances it seems ideal, allowing a clarity, an immediacy and a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the Old Normal – at least, if you keep your eyes closed.
So there was an almost physical depth and presence to the huge, translucent sheets of string tone that Seal deployed in Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne. This is the changeling half sister of Britten’s Serenade: a rich, strange garland of verses by poets ranging from Keats to Tennyson, all preoccupied with dream states and scored for a handful of obligato wind, brass and percussion instruments, plus strings. A chamber ensemble is implied, and I’ve never seen it done with more than a handful of players: certainly not with a string section (it looked like around 40 players) as large as this.
It worked superbly, the added bulk of sound giving an eerie, overcast shimmer to Britten’s vast, becalmed vistas, and a satisfying bite to his sudden flashes of terror or wide-eyed joy. Up front, Ian Bostridge (pictured right) was the soloist, and Bostridge never does anything as straightforward as merely sing. He lost himself in the huge misty spaces between keening violins and velvet basses: flattening his tone into a sinister snarl, blanching it to a ghostly echo, or letting fly with brazen tenor fanfares in the sequence where Britten evokes Tennyson’s Kraken. That he could audibly tint and shape words almost by the syllable is testimony to Seal’s control over that big string section – a control which, paradoxically, allowed the other players to handle their musical illustrations and interjections with an improvisatory vividness: a glaucous, coiling bassoon; silvery thunder from the timpani, and harp flurries that sounded like spindrift in the moonlight.
The second part of this shortened concert (a planned opener of Bax’s Tintagel fell victim to Covid-era running times) comprised Malcolm Arnold’s Fifth Symphony: now 60 years old, as Seal reminded us in a brief spoken introduction (and it’s been the best part of half a century since the composer conducted the CBSO in a now-classic recording). Orchestration as brilliant as Arnold’s doesn’t need much help, but Seal – a former orchestral violinist – took nothing for granted in a performance that took this most compelling of modern British symphonies and made it gleam. The cataclysmic brass eruptions, the glistening harp and bell ostinati, and the cymbal topped sunbursts came through exactly as brilliantly as you’d hope. More surprising were the details revealed by Seal’s command of texture and balance: violin phrases arcing anxiously out of the tumult, or a celesta shimmering within a muffled string chord, like embers glimpsed through ashes.
Perhaps that makes it sound like a glorified concerto for orchestra. In fact, Seal made a powerful a case for this symphony, both as tautly-argued musical structure and compelling (and tragic) emotional narrative. The first movement was properly tempestuoso, and the great melody of the slow movement played out in an uneasy, fragile stillness which belied Arnold’s own self-mocking, defensive comment (he knew what to expect from the critics at that stage in the game) that ‘the composer is unable to distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality’. The final collapse, accordingly, carried its full emotional weight, and Seal brought the symphony to rest without point-making or exaggeration: the logical, and inevitable conclusion of a tragedy that had been prefigured from the opening bars. Sakari Oramo (another former orchestral violinist) gives Arnold’s Fifth its (belated) Proms premiere in August; meanwhile this was powerful and intelligent advocacy for a symphony whose time might finally have arrived.