6 hours ago
7
Sibelius’s second symphony is “a confession of the soul” – an outpouring, however ambiguous. But what happens when a confession never comes, and a secret festers instead in collective silence? That’s the starting point for Festen, Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film, which was adapted into an award-winning opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage and librettist Lee Hall last year.
There’s a fair bit of plot to a work in which incestuous child abuse is exposed during a patriarch’s 60th birthday party, but it’s the atmosphere that lingers, stylishly distilled in Turnage’s new Festen Suite – receiving its UK premiere here from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo.
You can almost smell the stale wine and cigar smoke coming off the composer’s vividly orchestrated prelude, gurning with faux-jollity – literally beaten into it by percussion wallops that try to keep its lurching progress on track. Thereafter, the eight-movement suite ricochets between lyricism – the gentle melancholy of Blue or Green, pastoral tenderness in Grandma’s Song – and denial, slinky in the Conga with its rictus grin, sleazy in Interlude I. Then revelations break the surface in the jabbing thrusts of The Fight, string padding stripped away to allow brass and woodwind to land their punches cleanly. It’s cleverly made and musically satisfying on its own terms, without the dramatic scaffolding of the opera. I think we’ll be hearing it a lot in future.
If the Turnage brought a hip-shimmy and wriggle to Oramo’s conducting, the Sibelius – home turf for the Finn – found him straight as a Scots pine, guiding us through this patchwork of a symphony with clarity, that finale in sight from the off. Momentum rather than release was the order of the day, until at last he let the brass off the leash, romping us home with grandeur, certainly, but also an overflowing joy.
It was the catharsis we needed after Britten’s inscrutable cello symphony. Soloist Guy Johnston stayed scrupulously, sensitively faithful to the composer’s conception: the orchestra’s equal, often a part of the texture rather than its focus. It’s a tough balance to pull off anywhere; in the Royal Albert Hall it risked disappearing entirely in a cerebral performance whose subtleties will have been captured on radio, but which were a little lost in the moment.
