BBCSO/Schuldt review – Phibbs’ cello concerto brings cohesion to uneven program | classical music

pRegardless of the performance, this somewhat hectic concert would have benefited from a clearer organizational outlook to tie its disparate works together. Fortunately, Joseph Phipps’s Cello Concerto, written for Guy Johnston and here receiving its world premiere, brought its own musical cohesion, distinguishing itself in an uneven programme.

Delicately crafted, its five contrasting movements had a warm tone and boasted polychromatic harmony with rich, smooth string writing and imaginative effects in wind, brass and percussion. Emerging from gentle double bass pizzicato and padded cello, Johnston’s solo line, pensive and unshowy throughout, was delicately framed thanks to Clemens Schuldt’s conscious control of the forces of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Aubade’s shimmering, trembling music, full of light and dance, gave way to the mournful elegy, a long cello aria stretched over a pulsating orchestral heartbeat. It was an eerie nocturnal piece, tense and restless, haunted by the cries of night birds and perhaps something more sinister, before the mournful sound of this attractive new concerto brought it to a bright conclusion.

Elsewhere things were less consistent. Tchaikovsky’s “Hamlet,” an elongated tone poem complete with a hulking ghost, a Russian-accented Ophelia and a gruff military intervention, got its ass kicked from Schuldt whose clipped, brittle reading was undeniably rousing, if low on warmth. In just five minutes, Mel Bonis’s “Ophélie,” one of the late Romantic composer’s series of brilliant musical sketches of iconic women, proves that less is often more. Rolling harp, sweeping strings and mournful flute envelop the forlorn heroine as she drifts to her watery grave. But the performance was on the noisy side.

The German conductor was more involved in the anonymous cobblestone suite than Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. His interpretation was idiomatic, the waltz sequences swung well, but the tendency to micromanage robbed the music of some of its flow. However, no amount of arm-waving could cover up the cracks in this Frankenstein’s monster, as the music lurched from one dripping piece to the next. Schuldt’s tendency to increase the volume only added to the sense of misguided threat. A shame as the orchestral playing was once again excellent.