BBC NOW: Back to the Brangwyn

      I feel I have to tread carefully here, and maybe it would be better if I just didn't bother, but I'm up for a challenge.  In any case I so loved the final piece in last night's concert at the Brangwyn Hall that I fell compelled to mark it in some way.  
     So to the programme - it's a good place to start.  There were three pieces: Higgins's 'A Monstrous Little Suite', Weinberg's Concert for Trumpet & Orchestra, and Shostakovich's 6th Symphony.  The conductor was Ryan Bancroft, and the trumpet soloist, Håkan Hardenberger.  Gavin Higgins was also present and, if I may say so, sporting a rather fine beard.  I suppose what connect these three works is a sense that each is haunted (perhaps too strong a word) by the past.

      'A Monstrous Little Suite' Op is a five movement suite based on Higgins's opera 'The Monstrous Child' of 2019.  It was rather like the 'Curate's Egg'.  There was some wonderful orchestration.  I warmed to the slow movements - an interval canon (?) started the 2nd movement but was quickly dropped.  It was all rather like the score to a 50/60s Hollywood thriller, with all that unease that sadly one all too often associates with contemporary Classical Music, but without the images it was all rather inexplicable.

     So to the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, Op 94, by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996).  I like the Violin Concerto (1959), (I'm actually listening to it now) but I think this must be the first time I have attended a concert and actively hated a piece.  The bf wasn't that keen either, but we both opted for the British thing and politely applauded.  Points for 'pushing' the audience, but the first half was pretty much indigestible.

     Things were a good deal more digestible in the second half with Shostakovich 6.  A bit overlooked, I should think, being sandwiched between two mighty works the 5th and 7th symphonies.  The symphony is both, paradoxically, a balanced and unbalanced work.  By which I mean each movement is perfectly balanced of itself, but the entire work is slightly out of kilter, consisting of a mere three movements - adagio, scherzo and presto - of which the first is larger than the other two combined.  In addition the movements seem disconnected - Sibelius inflected Romanticism in the 1st movement to Neo-Classicism in the 3rd. The symphony's brevity, a mere half an hour or so, is not reflected in the music.  Nothing feels rushed; the opening adagio is expansive, solemn and at times mysterious; the other two movements lively, by turns capricious and, sometimes, bombastic.  The whole, for all its 'oddities' is quite compelling. It put a smile on my face.