Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at The Lighthouse – Mark Wigglesworth conducts Wagner & Walton, and Nicholas McCarthy plays Ravel

This was an auspicious start to the relationship between the Bournemouth Symphony and its recently appointed Chief Conductor Mark Wigglesworth. And in the first of five programmes this season at Poole with him, the BSO was on barnstorming form.

A well-paced Prelude to The Mastersingers began proceedings, with grandeur and forward momentum uppermost. The richness of string tone, expressive woodwind and incisive brass were all perfectly balanced to create an involving account.

The Ravel was the result of a commission from the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm on the Russian front during the first few weeks of World War One. Nicholas McCarthy (the first one-handed pianist to graduate from the Royal College of Music) informed us that he was not the first such pianist to perform with the BSO, for Wittgenstein had played Britten’s Diversions in 1950. Ravel’s single-movement links virtuosity with solace and savage outbursts, to which McCarthy brought considerable power, most evidently in the piano’s lowest register, though not without tenderness in lyrical episodes. There was much to admire from the orchestra, Wigglesworth ensuring a sensitive collaboration which drew beguiling contributions from contrabassoon and trombone, Ravel’s distinctive timbres elsewhere vividly etched. As an encore, McCarthy’s delicate touch was heard to impressive effect in Scriabin’s Nocturne Opus 9.

It was Walton’s First Symphony that really showed the BSO’s mettle in a detailed and taut performance. Indeed, it was an account of world-class stature, the players meeting its challenges head on, malevolence, tenderness and nobility magnificently realised. Tension and release in the first movement was finely judged, its eruptions never over-egged and woodwind cameos persuasively shaped, with brass and timpani magisterial in the closing bars. The Scherzo was an untamed beast, it’s malizia properties searing, while the chamber sonorities of the slow movement came over as a bittersweet lament, Anna Pyne’s flute a consoling presence within its emotional turmoil. And to the Finale – “one for the mob” as Walton confessed – music of joyful abandon yet played with swagger and fierce precision, its irrepressible energy, not forgetting a poised trumpet solo, ranking this account up with the finest.

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