CBSO/Yamada Review – Trombone Moore’s Adventures in Fujikura’s Sound Oceans | classical music

TRombon concertos don’t come along every day. The last time the Cinderella of the brass section had a big moment in the spotlight was in 2022, when the concert band hosted its first trombone solo in nearly 20 years. Before then, you have to go back to 2008 to make headlines – when a dazzling 12-year-old broke records as the youngest ever winner of the BBC Young Musician Award. Trombonist in each case? Peter Moore.

Now, with a decade in the London Symphony Orchestra under his belt, Belfast-born Moore is one of the great champions of his instrument, one whose growing repertoire has much to do with his compelling calling. He had an interesting platform in Dai Fujikura’s Vast Ocean II (2023) – a reworking of the composer’s 2005 trombone concerto, given its UK premiere here by Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Stanisław Lem’s science fiction novel Solaris Provides the starting point: Fujikura Orchestra, Crowded Ocean, Conscious, Other Ocean, Trombone, Human Adventurer. “It’s George Clooney,” Fujikura joked about Moore in his pre-ceremony conversation. However, the musical effect is less Hollywood and more Tarkovsky – a pointillist palette of shimmering sounds and textures that rarely coalesces into anything conventionally developmental, preferring to swirl, echo, dissolve and reshape. Moore made his instrument sing, finding shifting colors in the score’s insistent, repetitive tones, coaxing the vocal slides into sighs and howls while Yamada conjured a rich, elusive background. Does it all add up to more than just a series of great audio episodes? I’m not sure. But Fujikura, ultimately, is the master of the unanswered musical question.

We traded other worlds for more familiar territory after the interval, and the earthy – and earthy – landscapes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. It’s a work that suits Yamada’s frankly instinctive musical spirit, a symphony painted in the broadest strokes. The Peasant Landler in the second movement swayed with more than a whiff of intoxication in the delicious string intonation, and the finale elicited a thunderclap of timpani before a stunning climax, brass on their feet, instruments raised triumphantly. Only in the third movement, with its sinister, minor-key version of Brother Jacques – the bells ringing not for prayer but for a funeral – were we missing something. There were grotesque things here, hints of sleazy horror in the klezmer theme, but not the bleak nothingness that was the necessary counterweight to all the symphonic life’s excess and optimism.