Judith Weir’s Begin Afresh, premiered by Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in their latest Prom, is a reflection on trees. Or rather, it is a musical expression of the forces within trees, and what they evoke as the cycle of the seasons change.
Though trees themselves are necessarily static, Weir’s three-movement score is anything but. It ripples sinuously in the spring, with almost a concertante role for lead violin Igor Yuzefovich, pulses mysteriously in the autumn, and is full of mostly quiet activity even in midwinter. Begin Afresh, a title drawn from Philip Larkin, is delicately scored and its ideas are always evolving in a recognisably traditional way. It even gets a bit Tolkienesque at times, with piano and brass conjuring passages that sounded distinctly like music for ents. Oramo and his players did it all proud.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of Schumann’s Spring symphony, which followed. Oromo’s conducting was characteristically brisk and bright, which the piece demands, and Schumann’s woodwind solos were poetically rendered. Overall, though, the ensemble playing needed more care and balance, especially in this big hall.
Absolutely no such reservations in Elgar’s violin concerto, which took up the second half. Here, the balance between soloist and orchestra, so crucial to this work, was as good as one could wish and the focus unerring. Christian Tetzlaff has only begun to play the concerto recently, but it was a masterly performance. The concentrated tension, always the hallmark of Tetzlaff’s playing, never flagged. Control of dynamics was particularly impressive, well matched by a responsive Oramo. Big moments were emphatically but never theatrically done. In the most intimate passages at the heart of Elgar’s concerto, above all in the cadenza near the end, Tetzlaff’s tone was a gossamer whisper.
In other hands, an encore might have been otiose after all that. But Tetzlaff’s playing of the andante from Bach’s A minor solo sonata proved just as magical, and seemed to draw the entire hall into its hushed meditations.
