Belshazzar’s Feast

10 December 2011, 19:30
Barbican Hall, London

Gerald Finley, baritone
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner, conductor

This performance will be broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Monday 12 December at 2pm, and will be available for seven days via the BBC iPlayer

Britten: Sinfonia da Requiem
Lacrymosa
Dies irae
Requiem aeternam

Sibelius: Songs
Kom nu hit, död (Come away, death), Op 60 No 1
På veranden vi havet (On a balcony beside the sea) Op 38 No 2
Koskenlaskijan morsiamet (The Rapids-rider’s brides) Op33

Sibelius: Belshazzar’s Feast –Suite, Op 51
Oriental Procession
Solitude
Nocturne
Khadra’s Dance

Walton: Belshazzar’s Feast

What the critics say

Alexandra Coghlan, The Arts Desk, 11 December 2011

It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Throbbing with dance, gaudy as an Eastern bazaar painted by a second-rate Victorian artist, Gardner’s Belshazzar was a wash of Technicolor extravagance among the twee reds and greens of Christmas classical programming.

And speaking of gaudy – it was quite the curiosity that Gardner offered us by way of aperitif. Sibelius’s Belshazzar’s Feast Suite is, as Gardner himself rather euphemistically expressed in his mid-concert remarks, a contrasting affair to the Walton. Eschewing the monumentality of the latter, the composer opts instead for a miniature set of movements, bypassing Belshazzar’s climactic death scene in favour of Orientalist musical musings.

The orchestral equivalent of descriptions of dark flashing eyes and heady scents of spices, these vignettes don’t see Sibelius at his nuanced best. Balancing rather affected contemplation (the second movement duet for solo viola and cello is a graceful exception) with colouristic scene-setting, this incidental music for Hjalmar Procope’s play glories unfashionably in the exotic. There was no faulting the teeth-flashing salesmanship of Gardner and his forces, but it was a novelty that proved just a little too disposable.

Opening with an arresting, unaccompanied recitative for male voice, William Walton’s oratorio sorts of the choral men from the boys. Those of the BBC Symphony Chorus certainly achieved the emphasis, even if it was all rather scrappy to begin with – a fistfight of closing consonants that gradually calmed itself into resolution during the opening section. By the time we reached the full-ensemble howl of “Jerusalem”, however, all was well, and gamely plunging into Gardner’s determinedly brisk tempos, the chorus led us into the whirling death-dance (“Thus in Babylon”) and through into the metallic brilliance of the closing section.

Supported and enveloped by magnificent cori spezzati of brass from the balcony, we lost ourselves among the opulence of Gardner’s orchestral textures. Marshalling chamber precision from the BBCSO, his was a reading that honoured the scope of English oratorio, as alien to the tea-urn-and-soggy-biscuits image of this rather Anglican genre as one could wish. Only the endlessly expressive diction of Gerald Finley (rarely have consonants yielded so much distaste as his at the excess of the Babylonians – “Of precious stones, of pearls, of fine linens…”) betrayed the work’s unimpeachably British credentials.

In an inspired piece of programming, Finley joined the orchestra before the interval for a sequence of Sibelius songs that must surely have been new in performance to most of us. A Finnish translation of Shakespeare’s “Come away, come away, death” saw dark vowels and mossy baritonal textures leavened by the unexpected gleam of a harp – one of a sequence of orchestral cameos that showcased Gardner’s ability to read to the textural nub of a score. The modal, existential miniature “On a Balcony Beside The Sea” that followed yearns beyond the confines of its form, reaching desperately out towards Wagnerian scope and chromatic release. Both here and in “The Rapids-Rider’s Bride” we perhaps missed those deepest colours that Finley’s voice doesn’t offer, but the narrative energy of this ballad tragedy – shared between the singer and some virtuosic orchestral writing – was in no question.

It seems perhaps perverse to emerge from a concert of such breadth still clinging to the curtain-raiser, but if ever there was a work that could transform this sacrificial altar of a performance slot into something more substantial it’s Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia Da Requiem. From the tentative graspings in low-strings and bassoon that open the Lachrymosa, the work’s through-composed three movements gain bitter and continuous momentum, only redeemed at the last second by the promise of peace offered in the Andante molto tranquillo. The saxophone – the spectral outsider at the orchestral feast – gets arguably its finest mainstream outing in this work, singing an unheeded lament that batters itself into oblivion against the mechanistic hollowness of flutter-tongued flutes and percussion.

This was the BBCSO at their best, with even the back desks of strings bringing the soloistic urgency to their performance that has so transformed Gardner’s English National Opera orchestra pit. In the midst of life (where more clamorously insistent than this season of Nativity?) Gardner and the orchestra plunged us into death and the chill was as brutal as it was exquisite.

Nick Kimberley, The Evening Standard, 12 December 2011

Five Stars

Short on festive cheer, long on dark foreboding, this was a concert to banish Christmas to the sidelines. Edward Gardner, English National Opera’s music director, knows how to wring the drama from any music; he began with Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, its opening funeral march shaking the floor beneath our feet. As volume, tempo and tension increased, there was a sense of grief accumulating in equal measure, until the piece gently folded in on itself, all passion spent.

Gaudy almost to the point of absurdity, William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast is English oratorio at its most unbuttoned. Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave it the full-colour, surround-sound treatment, with two offshoot bands playing high in the gods. At its first entry, the BBC Symphony Chorus sounded tentative but from then on sang with both passion and precision, while baritone Gerald Finley delivered the solos with the clarity of an orator, and the visionary nobility of a prophet. Gardner’s bow-tie was wildly skewiff at the end, one tiny token of the collective sense of elated exhaustion.

Sibelius’s Belshazzar’s Feast is altogether more restrained. The orchestra is smaller, less flashy, the gestures more inward. It made a telling contrast with the Walton but the evening’s most gorgeous moments came in three Sibelius songs.

I’ve no idea how idiomatic Finley’s Swedish and Finnish were but they sounded right, and his voice was as cold as winter, as hard as rock. The miniature saga of The Rapids-Rider’s Brides was angry and chilling in equal measure. Just right for Sibelius, just right for Christmas.

Christopher Gunning, Seen & Heard (Musicweb) International, 13 December 2011

Britten, Sibelius and Walton sharing the same concert? The BBC Symphony Orchestra is subject to some strange programme planning, but the works tonight made interesting bedfellows. The connection between Walton and Sibelius is not difficult to grasp: Walton was a great admirer of Sibelius, and in his First Symphony showed just how strongly the Finnish composer influenced him. But Belshazzar’s Feast shows Walton in an altogether different light, and its juxtaposition with Sibelius’s work of the same name showed just how different the thinking of the two composers could be. And Britten? A near contemporary of Walton, of course, but with his own unique musical language and thought processes.

His Sinfonia da Requiem is about the nearest Britten ever came to writing a purely orchestral symphony, and it certainly demonstrates that symphonic processes were very much part and parcel of his modus operandi. It is a fine work, immediately impressive, and with unfolding drama and an ingrained seriousness that displays Britten at his anguished anti-war best. Composed in 1940, much of this music hints at the War Requiem to come much later; thudding timpani, tortured melodies, snarling brass, whirling woodwind, and all the time a sense of Britten’s outrage. There are echoes of some other composers here – Mahler, and perhaps even Sibelius? Yet the 26-year-old composer was remarkably mature for one so young, and already had a sure control of form. The three movements, Lacrymosa, Dies Irae, and Requiem Aeternam, form a continuous whole, and individually have firm structures which carry the listener along a troubled route for twenty minutes or so, with only the last movement hinting at a degree of reluctant resolution. The commissioner of the piece, the Japanese Government, was not yet at war with Britain or the US, but rejected the piece because of its Christian connotations; ironic, then, that it has emerged as one of the most substantial not only of Britten’s works but also of the several other pieces simultaneously commissioned by the Japanese. Edward Gardner and his forces were in total command; the tempi felt just right, and with the BBC SO continuing to be at the top of its game this made for a powerful, committed and memorable performance; its sounds are still haunting me now, almost twenty-four hours later.

Gerald Finley was the soloist in three virtually unknown songs by Sibelius, which turned out to be delightful gems from the unmistakable hand of the master. Come Away Death, a setting of Shakespeare translated into Swedish, has simple muted strings and is bleakness personified. On a Balcony beside the Sea, to a text by Viktor Rydberg, has dark woodwinds and is imbued with a sense of isolation and desperation. The Rapids-Rider’s Brides (poem by August Ahlqvist-Oksanen) is larger in scale than the preceding two songs and hints strongly at the Sibelius of the early symphonies with its greater expansiveness and menacing brass, the latter even reminding us of Karelia. Finley was absolutely terrific, his vocal beauty enhanced by clear enunciation of every word, and Gardner was the most sensitive accompanist; this was exquisite music making of almost chamber music intensity.

Gardner continued to impress as a Sibelian in the Finn’s Belshazzar’s Feast. This music, the very antithesis of the Walton to follow, falls into four separate sections. The first, Oriental Procession, is a grotesque march. The second, Solitude, is a tiny but sweet miniature. The third, Nocturne, gave Michael Cox an opportunity to display some ravishingly expressive flute playing, and the fourth, Khadra’s Dance, seductive and delicate, reminded us what a fine clarinetist Chris Richards is. Sibelius opted for a whimsical, quasi Oriental, view of Belshazzar – as befitted pieces composed as incidental music for a play. What a contrast, then, to Walton’s monumental and exuberant cantata composed in his late twenties.

The gentlemen of the BBC Symphony Chorus got things off to a fine start with their opening declamation, and the full chorus followed, gently weaving their lines with wonderfully rich sonorities, to be joined by Gerald Finley in his plaintive “If I forget thee.” Once again combining noticeably fine diction with perfect intonation and sense of character, he took command of the proceedings with his long recitative and then we were plunged into sheer brilliance, as orgiastic and celebratory as you could want, for the rest of the piece. And you would have to be a real nitpicker to find any faults; the BBC Symphony Chorus sang with gusto and accuracy, the orchestra shot through the whole work with massive amounts of verve, and the brass, augmented by two groups up in the gods, were constantly thrilling. Gardner kept the tempi brisk, propelling things forward mercilessly. And, if I have to nitpick, the only thing I can find to say is that I wish this had been in the Royal Albert Hall, and it’s not often I’d say that! The Barbican hall, admirable though it is for such a variety of music, is just not quite man enough for music on Walton’s scale. Never mind. It was still a great evening, on this occasion narrowly won by the concert opener. That Britten – it really is a superb piece.

George Hall, The Guardian, 14 December 2011