This typically thoughtful programme from Sakari Oramo was marketed as ‘an evening-long meditation on life and the hereafter’. The Lark Ascending is scarcely that – Ursula Vaughan Williams also maintained that her husband, a reluctant countryman, could never have identified an actual lark – but we hear things differently once they are blessed with emblematic status. Today’s Lark does indeed accompany the dying and comfort the bereaved. It has always been the kind of music that lowers the blood pressure in a good way and, almost but not quite conjoined with Saariaho’s swansong on this occasion (we had a short speech from the conductor asking us not to applaud in between the two), its relative ‘simplicity’ made a particular impact. The soloist was the orchestra’s leader, Igor Yuzefovich, whose sweet tone and focused vibrato provided healing balm. He even remained unimpeachably in tune until almost the very end. Tempos were on the swift side of mainstream, although the central section relaxed into profounder reverie.
There was Vaughan Williams before the interval too, a more direct challenge to the soul to face death and eternity without fear. Oramo had previously conducted Toward the Unknown Region at the First Night of the 2018 Proms and again led a performance of real commitment. He favours a breezy approach, bringing translucent clarity to its tubbier Edwardian tendencies. The music is not entirely characteristic of the mature Vaughan Williams for all its anticipations of the Tallis Fantasia. The text was well enunciated, or seemed so in the ‘dead’ acoustic. Surtitles were nonetheless provided.
In recent years Oramo has established himself as a Mahlerian of distinction and originality but his opening item failed to make much impact on this occasion, variously stymied by the arrival of latecomers, the dropping of plastic beakers (a problem throughout the night) and the persistence of a mobile phone. Having discarded such shibboleths as antiphonally placed violins, this standalone Adagio also returned to the dodgier pre-Deryck Cooke version of the text – Oramo has in the past championed his complete performing version of the Tenth. There was no attempt to soften astringent edges, or was that the dehydrating impact of the hall again? The work as a whole moves beyond the death-haunted Ninth to celebrate the triumph of love. This chunk of it played here came across as sectional as well as oddly circumspect.
Not so Kaija Saariaho’s HUSH (2023), in which aesthetic norms are challenged with blunt directness. This was a major posthumous UK premiere from a stilled creative voice whose music, so often all about atmosphere, texture and mood, here incorporates more concrete images associated with her own cancer treatment. The third movement is a frighteningly literal evocation of an MRI scan that takes in some panicked shouting from the soloist. Technological advances, sometimes inevitably confirming the medical certainty of death, have encouraged cancer sufferers to move beyond vague intimations of the afterlife in their final compositions. In Christopher Rouse’s Sixth Symphony fear and doubt give way to an uncertain serenity over a long bass drone that needs must finally give out. Apart from the aforementioned outburst, Saariaho’s post-spectral idiom yields the kind of sonorous ritual you might expect, much of it bewitching and luminous. No point looking for too much in the way of meat on the bones. The work apparently draws on the musical substance and literary inspiration of her violin concerto, Graal Théâtre (1994) with the benefit of a lifetime’s experience and a fondness for jazz trumpet and multiphonics. Hushed vocal phrases reappear in a finale entitled ‘Ink the silence’ which, like all cultural production, can only end one way. The realisation was, or appeared to be, of sensational quality and total dedication. Fans of the genre-flexible Verneri Pohjola led a delayed standing ovation.
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