The latest of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s centenary commissions to reach Symphony Hall is Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Catamorphosis. A commission shared between four orchestras, it received its first performance during lockdown last year in a streamed concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Kirill Petrenko. Even heard in that compromised way, it seemed a remarkable achievement, a Sibelius-like evocation of the fragility of nature and its impending destruction; experienced live, with the CBSO conducted by Ludovic Morlot unfolding it so expertly, it was even more remarkable.
What seemed so impressive this time around was the structural integrity of Thorvaldsdottir’s scheme across the 20-minute span. Each new section grows inevitably from what precedes it, with her technique of building upon long-held bass pedal notes producing strikingly varied results – dense string clusters, woodwind ripples or shreds of consoling melody, and, about two-thirds of the way through, a repeated falling figure that is utterly simple, yet inexpressibly sad.
The CBSO is repeating the whole programme at the Aldeburgh festival, which explained why Catamorphosis was followed by the rather unconvincing symphonic suite from Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana, though the CBSO, and its principal second oboe Emmet Byrne especially, did their best to bring it to life. There was more Britten to end the concert too – the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes – but before that came Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, with Patricia Kopatchinskaja at her most irresistibly insistent as the soloist.
Kopatchinskaja in this mood is more force of nature than violinist, and the sheer intensity of her performance sometimes overshadowed the subtleties that she brought to the concerto – her virtually vibrato-less unfolding of the first movement, for instance, her phenomenal accuracy in the maelstrom of the scherzo, or her perfectly graduated build of intensity through the huge cadenza. An encore was inevitable, but, predictably, it was an unpredictable one – a wild duet with the orchestra’s principal bassoon Nikolaj Henriques. It was, Kopatchinskaja said, her impression of how Shostakovich must have felt at the time he wrote the violin concerto after reading the Pravda article condemning his music for the second time. She really is a one-off.
• Repeated at Snape Maltings on 18 June.
