Excellent performances and clearly much credit must go to Manze. His feelings for the music shone through the entire orchestra.
If the night was a concept, it was for once one that made sense. 4, 5 and 6 might simply be 4, 5 and 6 but surely they are also the before, during and after the last war.
As 3's Breakfast Houdini said, VW wasn't in the meadows here. Even he was unsure whether he liked the 4th but it did what he intended. The 6th is the apocalyptic companion to its foreboding, even if he disliked that etched in script.
And rather as Britain was in 1948, it is noticeably more mature. Everything comes together but emotionally a heavy price has been paid for it. It is grave but undeniably impressive.
It is the 5th though that I love. It might have been written when the country was in the thick of it. It achieves the impossible by almost escaping into bucolic fantasy. And then as it rises to the heavens, its form of rebellion is a thing of real beauty.
That it is "the middle one" that is the easiest to play says much about the SSO's task tonight. They dealt with it magnificently. As for John Shirley-Quirk, experts can use the past tense but he got married in 2009 as any self-respecting 78 year old would.
If the night was a concept, it was for once one that made sense. 4, 5 and 6 might simply be 4, 5 and 6 but surely they are also the before, during and after the last war.
As 3's Breakfast Houdini said, VW wasn't in the meadows here. Even he was unsure whether he liked the 4th but it did what he intended. The 6th is the apocalyptic companion to its foreboding, even if he disliked that etched in script.
And rather as Britain was in 1948, it is noticeably more mature. Everything comes together but emotionally a heavy price has been paid for it. It is grave but undeniably impressive.
It is the 5th though that I love. It might have been written when the country was in the thick of it. It achieves the impossible by almost escaping into bucolic fantasy. And then as it rises to the heavens, its form of rebellion is a thing of real beauty.
That it is "the middle one" that is the easiest to play says much about the SSO's task tonight. They dealt with it magnificently. As for John Shirley-Quirk, experts can use the past tense but he got married in 2009 as any self-respecting 78 year old would.
) my stand-out moment tonight was that big slushy strings & harp tune in 6i. I've never felt before that it really fitted in with the rest of the work properly. But tonight it did. Manze seemed to play down the slushiness/ripeness/ English pastoral factor just a teenzy bit and left the passage sounding just a tad uneasy, so that for me it didn't stick out like a sore thumb as it always has before. Hurrah! Just a tiny detail in one magnificent evening.
Wavelengths etc... 
Comment