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The Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali with solo violinist Pekka Kuusisto at the Royal Festival Hall.
The night Finntastic… the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali with solo Pekka Kuusisto at the Royal Festival Hall. Photograph: Mark Allan
The night Finntastic… the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali with solo Pekka Kuusisto at the Royal Festival Hall. Photograph: Mark Allan

The week in classical: Music of Today; Rites: Philharmonia/Rouvali; Amadigi; Venus and Adonis

This article is more than 2 years old

Purcell Room; Royal Festival Hall; Hackney Empire; Blackheath Halls, London
Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s first season with the Philharmonia gets off to a flying start alongside compatriot Pekka Kuusisto. Elsewhere, trouble at English Touring Opera

Corals, anemones, the pop of snapping shrimp, the nibbling of parrotfish consuming the reef: an entire ecosystem under threat. How can a composer say anything useful about the climate crisis? When Elgar wrote Where Corals Lie, the most popular of his song cycle Sea Pictures (1894), there was no crisis: his sea, envisioned by poets, was a place of romance and voluptuous dark enchantment. For the American composer and environmental activist Gabriella Smith (b1991), the imperative is different. She took a paddleboat out on the reefs of French Polynesia and used a hydrophone to record the underwater sound world and recreate it in music.

The result is the delicate chamber piece Anthozoa (2018), eerie, sensuous, which opened the Philharmonia’s early-evening Music of Today concert in a packed Purcell Room, hosted by the Finnish violinist-conductor Pekka Kuusisto, with members of the orchestra. They also performed the UK premiere of there is no one, not even the wind by John Luther Adams (b1953), the father of American composer environmentalists. This half-hour 2017 piece– extremely quiet and incredibly slow – was inspired by the deserts of northern Mexico.

The concert was a curtain-raiser to the second of the Philharmonia’s eco-aware Human/Nature series under the baton of their new, and on the evidence so far, exhilarating principal conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Rouvali and Kuusisto, Finns both, showed their close musical kinship in the UK premiere of Bryce Dessner’s Violin Concerto (2020), a Philharmonia/Southbank Centre co-commission. For Dessner (b1976), who as a member of US band the National moves fluidly between rock and classical and everywhere in between, the work’s impulse was the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. This sense of travelling the same footsteps, past and present, surfaced in the concerto, which begins with an urgent whip-crack and hardly pauses for breath. Dessner nods towards the entire tradition of violin concertos, the echoes stylistic rather than literal: in the rapid finger work beloved of Vivaldi, or in the fast, silvery string crossings (“bariolage”) of Mendelssohn.

The work also embraces Kuusisto’s own unchained versatility. Steeped in folk fiddle as well as classical, you see from the way this mesmerising performer drops his bowing arm, or props the violin closer to chest than shoulder, that he has no technical inhibition and plays as the music demands. There were ethereal, gossamer moments too, which Kuusisto does so well, though the dominant mood is inextinguishable. It’s worth tracking down this entire concert, which opened with a noisy, boiling, colourful work by Silvestre Revueltas, on BBC Sounds. It ended with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a work closely associated for the orchestra with Rouvali’s predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen. The new team made it their own, in a gripping, at times almost recklessly wild account. The Sacrificial Dance, in which a young girl is forced brutally to her death, had chilling, heightened resonance.

All companies ebb and flow, but English Touring Opera, in terms of management rather than singers and instrumentalists, is momentarily lost at sea. A quick Google will lead you to reports of a serious dispute with the Musicians’ Union (the sacking of 14 orchestra members citing the need for greater diversity). The distraction has not helped the new production of Handel’s Amadigi (1715), which opened at Hackney Empire last weekend before a UK tour. Staged by artistic director James Conway, it was so thin and dreary as to give baroque opera a bad name. I’d urge you to support it for the sake of the quartet of singers – William Towers, Jenny Stafford, Rebecca Afonwy-Jones and Harriet Eyley, and the young soloist (a different choice each night, drawn from the locality), the period instrument Old Street Band (not the ensemble under dispute) and the conductor, Jonathan Peter Kenny. Luckily, Handel’s music gets better and better in this “magic” opera as the work unravels, and that’s worth treasuring.

Venus and Adonis (1683), by Purcell’s near contemporary John Blow, was the small-scale choice for this year’s Blackheath Halls Community Opera. This collaboration between young professional talent – soloists Claire Lees, Harry Thatcher and Rebecca Leggett – and local adults and schoolchildren, with students from Trinity Laban, overcame the frustrations of the past 18 months. Christopher Stark conducted a lively performance from all. James Hurley’s hectic, pink-and-gold TV gameshow production, with Cupid as host, kept everyone busy. Don’t ask me to explain exactly what was happening, but it was spirited and fun. And there was always a gaggle of charming Little Cupids on hand just when you needed them.

Star ratings (out of five)
Music of Today
★★★★
Philharmonia Orchestra/Rouvali
★★★★
Amadigi
★★
Venus and Adonis
★★★★

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