HK Gruber, the BBC Philharmonic's composer-conductor, is about to take his orchestra – "my Manchester Rolls-Royce" he calls them – to his native Vienna for a short residency, "to show them how an orchestra sounds," he quipped. Vienna might well wonder what has hit it, if this powerhouse programme makes the same impact there as it did in Manchester.
The main work was Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. Gruber made much of the piece's mixture of artifice and intensity, so we were constantly aware of how its formal rigidity both offsets and highlights its emotional violence. The playing was terrific and shot through with savagery, the orchestral colours suggesting the hardness of metal and stone. There was breathtaking singing from the Hallé Choir, too.
Gruber also managed to assemble one of the most impressive casts heard in the piece for a while. Oedipus was played by Ian Bostridge, who aspirated his coloratura at times; but Stravinskyan stylisation suits him rather well, and he charted the progression from hauteur to debasement with passion and commitment. Jocasta lies a bit low for Angelika Kirchschlager, though her histrionic powers were in ample evidence. Matthew Best was the suitably uptight Tiresias, Timothy Robinson the sorrowing Shepherd. Unfortunately, Gruber let the orchestra swamp the singers in places: we couldn't hear enough of either the Oedipus/Jocasta duet or Darren Jeffrey's Creon.
Its companion pieces were the interludes from James MacMillan's opera The Sacrifice and Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. MacMillan's debt to Britten – Peter Grimes in particular – was never in doubt. Gruber's decision to deploy a huge body of strings made the Serenade sound very sensual. Richard Watkins was the superb horn player, Timothy Robinson the ecstatic tenor, rapturously at ease with Britten's high-lying vocal writing. Bliss.
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