University of York Symphony Orchestra - Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall - 16/12/2009

There is always a feeling of excitement when hearing a piece of music for the first time and this concert offered me a triple dose. First on the programme was Maurice Ravel’s Menuet antique, one of his lesser known pieces. Originally written for piano, Ravel then orchestrated it, so it was obviously a piece he considered worth remembering. I was a little curious as to why John Stringer had not chosen a more famous piece from that impressionistic period with its wealth of beautiful orchestral music, and why this piece itself was not better known. My suspicions were unfortunately realised, as I did not feel that this was one of Ravel’s most musically accomplished works, despite being played with real delicacy and precision. The beautiful lyrical line of Ravel’s melody was carried majestically through the string section, with elegance and subtlety. My only criticism of the playing was that the wind section in some of the more exposed lines sounded under-rehearsed, and a little tentative and shaky at times.

The second piece, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D is an immense and ambitious work to take on. All credit should go to Charlotte Ward-Caddle, who played with infectious gusto and vigour. Technically it is an extremely hard piece for violin, and the line at the start was inevitably slightly tense, yet Charlotte’s playing became increasingly more fluent and accomplished. There were some moments of superb playing, most noticeably when the instrumental forces were broken down at one point to a duet between the violinist and oboist, which was truly beautiful.

The opening of the second movement was magical, with the simplicity and exposure of the violin line soaring above the strings in rich sustained harmonies. In the third movement, the fastest and apparently the most technically challenging of the movements – although this is probably not the case, as it very rarely is with faster movements – Charlotte’s sheer enjoyment of the music shone through and really did capture the piece, becoming a true performance in which the performer herself was completely immersed in what she was expressing.

Orchestral music has the ability to change the state of your emotions; in a few minutes the music can determine how you are feeling and unexpectedly give you the ability to think about things from a new perspective and question your own preconceptions. When a piece of music does all these things and you come from the concert hall feeling completely differently from when you entered it, you know that between the performers and the composer something has worked and something, even if only something very small, has changed the way you think. Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, the last and most extraordinary work of the evening, did this for me. I would not recommend listening to this piece in the comfort of your own home as I feel it is essentially a performance piece – a rarity that can only really make an impact if you are there in the audience seeing and hearing the work take place. The tension created between performers and audience and between the performers themselves, namely the instrumentalists and singers, made it feel as though this was a premiere of a piece that no one had heard before. It was performed with levels of precision and excitement which complimented each other so fittingly, one couldn’t help but be immersed in its strange and oddly awkward beauty.

The first movement took me completely by surprise: it was intensely gripping and played with a very high level of accuracy. Unfortunately, a technical hitch meant that there was a long pause between the first and second movements. It was testimony to the quality of the playing that the audience did not get restless and start talking, but were completely silent through the long wait for the sound to be fixed, and the tension that was beautifully created in the first movement was restored immediately at the beginning of the second.

However, it was the third movement which captivated the audience and players alike. The singers’ words, or rather sounds and movement, were created as though for the first time. The eight singers in a semi-circle in front of the orchestra were like a new section, not of instrumentalists but of sound. A spontaneity, which I learned afterwards is apparent in the score, with musical directions such as “hum imitating the cellos”, helped create that feel of a premiere of a piece of music. It is testimony to Berio’s ability that he could write music that would create this effect each time.

Graham Bier, one of the singers in this group, Yorvox, explained his enjoyment in the intensity of the music; “At one point, of course everyone has their own interpretation, but I felt I was yelling at the conductor, ‘Keep going’, ‘stop’”. And he was, literally yelling! He felt the singer’s role was a murmuring in the background, a musical interpretation of the inner consciousness of the audience’s mind. I found it fascinating that Berio was exploring the boundaries of audience and performer in this piece, but the real beauty is that it could be anything you wanted it to be. Throughout the performance I wanted the mic levels of the voices turned up so I could hear what the singers were singing; references to the Bible, T.S. Eliot and Karl Marx were all in there but the individual words were inaudible. Graham explained that whenever this piece was being performed, Berio would turn the levels down deliberately so that the audience could not hear the voices, sneakily inciting and maintaining a feeling of tension and curiosity.

I thought that the interaction and the dialogue between the eight singers gave a visually stunning element. They all did a sterling job with, technically, an extraordinarily difficult work to render. As Graham Beir commented, “It was a real high to perform”, and this was a feeling that seemed to be shared by the audience. I came away from this concert feeling I had been exposed to something special – a performance which I won’t forget in a hurry.

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