Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is about to begin her second full season as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. It is clear she has already established a wonderful rapport with the orchestra, but audiences are still discovering her strengths as a conductor and learning which composers attract her.
This process will continue in the years to come, but the programme that Gražinytė-Tyla and her orchestra brought to the Proms was built around two composers who have already featured prominently in her Birmingham concerts – Beethoven and Stravinsky.
Beethoven top-and-tailed the concert. A couple of months ago, Gražinytė-Tyla closed an evening at Symphony Hall with the third of the Leonora overtures, but here it was her bracing opener. The piece, which always seems more a tone poem than a functional operatic overture, felt especially packed with drama. It was carried along by the extraordinary buoyancy that Gražinytė-Tyla brings to everything she conducts, translating the airy fluidity of her gestures on the podium directly into her performances. As such, the Fifth Symphony that ended the programme was just as fleet and agile – superbly played and thrillingly dramatic – without introducing any of the work’s usual portentousness.
The Stravinsky in between was the Violin Concerto in D. Leila Josefowicz was the fierce, fast-witted soloist, who relished every detail of the scoring and the chain of partnerships it sets up between the solo violin and the orchestral principals, all of them brought vividly into the foregound by Gražinytė-Tyla. For the finale, Josefowicz set a seemingly impossible speed, as if daring conductor and orchestra to keep up; they took it in their collective stride.
Featuring an overture, a concerto and a symphony, this might have been a conventional (not to say old-fashioned) programme, but before the symphony there was a new work, a BBC commission from Gerald Barry, that was anything but.
Canada is a seven-minute setting for tenor (the indefatigable Allan Clayton) of a few lines from the famous Prisoners’ Chorus in the first act of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. The idea of the piece came to Barry when he was waiting for a flight at Toronto airport, hence the title. However, the word “Canada” infiltrates his text, too, serving as a motto for each reiteration of the Fidelio words, which were spoken, sung and muttered by the orchestra, which also supplied the usual Barry punctuation of jagged riffs and occasional eruptive violence. It is strange – and strangely discomfiting.
- On BBC4 on 27 August and available on BBC iPlayer until 19 September. The Proms continue until 9 September. Box office: 0845-401 5040.
