When it comes to composing large-scale works for the concert hall, the concerto for orchestra is the genre of choice for Robin Holloway. His latest, a BBC commission Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony brought to the Albert Hall for its first performance, is his fifth, and earlier works in the series rank among Holloway's finest achievements. By his own standards – Holloway admits he is an "expansionist" – its dimensions are quite modest: the five movements last about half an hour, in contrast to the Fourth Concerto, first performed in 2007, three times as long, and still to be heard in Britain.
Holloway describes the Fifth Concerto as a kind of "colour symphony" beginning with a black first movement and, in the reordered sequence Runnicles conducted, progressing through an airy green scherzo, brief adagio in rainbow shades, a limpid blue andante and ending with a pillar-box red finale. Texturally and harmonically, the music also moves from complexity to clarity, passing through some sumptuous and vividly evocative territory en route. Holloway revealed that Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces was one of his starting points, but the concerto's musical world seems much closer to the Schoenberg of Gurrelieder and Pelleas und Melisande than to the expressionist works. Among more recent composers, Henze, or his later symphonies at least, seems distantly related, too, though Holloway has fewer hangups about embracing tonality than either of the German composers.
Runnicles and his orchestra gave the concerto a fine first performance, after which the rest of the concert seemed an anticlimax. There was a distinctly unradiant account of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, with Hillevi Martinpelto as the soloist, followed by a routine one of Brahms's Second Symphony, which Runnicles kept on a very tight expressive leash.
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