BBCNOW/Bancroft/Gerhardt Review – Intriguing connections, magical and bleak beauty | classical music

CAdavre Exquis was the game – akin to a game of consequences – in which Surrealist artists like Yves Tanguy and Joan Miro made separate contributions to a single work without seeing what anyone else did, to see how the image might develop, or just for the hell of it. Anders Hellborg took the principle as inspiration for his composition Magnificent Corpse, but where the Surrealists had hoped for signs of an unconscious collective sensibility, the emerging components in Hellborg’s score bear his conscious individual imprint while also including references to composers as disparate as Stravinsky, Ligeti and Sibelius.

In a performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under its principal conductor Ryan Bancroft, the unfolding layers of sound have never been less vivid. Hellborg’s instinct for a dazzling array of instrumental color—delicate tendrils of harmony, brutally rumbling bass registers, sustained conga drumming, and raucous picolos—taunted and teased the ear before finally fading into a gentle haze.

Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite Op 22 made for an interesting surreal connection, because in Swan of Tuonela – the second of a series of four-tone poems based on episodes from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic – the shamanic demigod hero Lemminkäinen is killed and his body dismembered. His mother then lovingly brought this magnificent corpse back to life so that he could return home victorious. Drawing out absolutely gorgeous string playing, with Amy Macken’s solo most evocative, Bancroft found a balance between the narrative drama and the intoxicating elemental quality of Sibelius’ score, while also creating an overall positive symphonic path.

Between these two works came Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2, Op 126 in G major in which the soloist was the great Alban Gerhardt. In his hands, it was the music’s melancholy beauty rather than the underlying tragic vein that came through so poignantly, the high A string writing was flawlessly delivered, and in the Allegretto movement, Shostakovich’s sombre-satirical rhythmic sting was finely honed. After such an intense experience, nothing was more gratifying than to see Gerhardt, the unassuming champion of the cello, join the back of the cello section to play in the Sibelius Suite. Just for hell’s sake.