United Kingdom Wagner, Britten, Brahms: Clara-Jumi Kang (violin), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Mark Wigglesworth (conductor). Lighthouse, Poole, 7.5.2025. (CK)
Wagner – Lohengrin, Prelude to Act I
Britten – Violin Concerto
Brahms – Symphony No.4
Is there an opera that opens as radiantly as Lohengrin? There was good cause to wonder this as the sounds of the Act I Prelude (which Wagner apparently wrote last) stole upon our ears, its noble arc carefully controlled up to its burnished climax and down again until it fades from our hearing. The opening is a stern test for the violins: the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra players were up to it, their threads of sound suggesting fragility as well as other-worldliness.
The music also allowed us to assess the effect of a change of orchestral layout: violins left and right, cellos and double basses switched from right to left, and the horns promoted from their separate position to the left of the clarinets to the top step, making an unbroken line of horns and heavy brass. In Wagner this made for a warm, blended brass sound; elsewhere in the concert it seemed to make the sound of the horns less distinct and impactful. Intriguing.
The performance of Britten’s Violin Concerto that followed was astonishing. Britten was in his mid-twenties when he finished it in September 1939 (a date that speaks for itself, though Britten was also severely affected by the Spanish Civil War). It is in some ways an elder sister to the Sinfonia da Requiem, which followed shortly after: the quiet 5-note tattoo on timpani and cymbals with which it opens may be less dramatic than the timpani thwacks that launch the Sinfonia, but they are similarly a gateway to a troubled musical landscape; and they persist, in one form or another, sinister and quietly destabilising. The soloist – the remarkable Clara-Jumi Kang – enters, like a wanderer in a wasteland, with a fragile theme; but it is not long before she is drawn into a vortex of triple-stopping, the orchestra responding with harsh trumpet fanfares. Against a slow, Spanish-flavoured dance the soloist takes charge of – or is possessed by – the opening 5-note figure; it then persists as a quiet timpani tattoo beneath a cadenza-like passage for the soloist.
I am being unnecessarily descriptive, I know: but in a performance of this intensity one lives from moment to moment. As in the Sinfonia da Requiem, the concerto’s two main movements flank a demonic Scherzo: Mark Wigglesworth secured some razor-sharp orchestral playing here – in the extraordinary passage for chittering piccolos over cavernous tuba we were close to the shadowy nightmares of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. There was fiery and sometimes stratospheric playing from the soloist, and a passionate cadenza which seemed about to disintegrate into scraps flying in the air.
As (famously) in the Brahms symphony to follow, the finale is a Passacaglia, its theme intoned solemnly by the trombones. A keening trumpet; a fervent, Mahlerian paragraph for the strings; an anguished soloist, pitted against dark forces; this listener too involved emotionally to follow the nine variations over the Passacaglia theme. Strings and oboe steady the ship; there is a powerful though peaceful climax. Muted trombones and harp hint at consolation; the soloist seems to want to emulate the Berg Violin Concerto, winging her way upwards: but resolution proves finally elusive.
I am completely unable to do justice to Clara-Jumi Kang’s performance, or to the way in which Wigglesworth and the orchestra partnered her. At the end her first reaction was to applaud wholeheartedly the musicians behind her: rightly so. The musical impression she made upon us was well matched by her supremely elegant, yet modest dress.
We know by now that Mark Wigglesworth knows and loves the Brahms symphonies. In this performance of the Fourth the second movement’s melodies were beautifully caressed; the horn playing was suave, the fervent string tune towards the end heartfelt, its dynamics sensitively controlled. The finale’s variations on Brahms’s stern, rocklike theme led to a strong finish (with some nice work from Anna Pyne’s flute along the way).
Wigglesworth conducted it con amore and with a clear sense of drama: but – I have to be honest – I found much of it a tad dull. Perhaps the Britten Violin Concerto had exhausted my receptive powers; or perhaps I had absorbed something subliminally (Britten was no fan of Brahms). But there it is. I must do better next time.
The performance was very warmly received. Of course the triangle player got a cheer, though I thought his performance rather reticent: not the manic jangling of a man making the most of Brahms’s only use of percussion (other than timpani) in any of his symphonies. I think he should have gone for it.
Chris Kettle
Featured Image: Mark Wigglesworth rehearsing the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra © BSO
I much admire your eloquence in reporting on the above concert. I rather wish I could have read your words before listening to the concert because, although I thoroughly enjoyed the performance of the BSO, I think I may have appreciated some elements of it rather more with your insight and focus.
Will look forward to reading future reviews.
Thank you for this, Veronica. I’ll do my best!