BBCSO/Oramo review – an unforgettable experience

Barbican, London
Busoni’s gargantuan piano concerto was an irresistible draw in an adventurous programme of 20th-century rarities

Orchestral concert of the year? It would need to be outstanding to better this one. The evening brought together three important works from the early 20th century, culminating in Ferruccio Busoni’s gargantuan piano concerto of 1904 – an irresistible draw, as it’s a piece that seems to come around about as often as Halley’s comet. For Busoni anoraks, the fact that Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were on blazing form all evening was simply a bonus.

But it wasn’t only the Busoni. Given the need for a chorus in the last movement of the concerto, the programmers took the opportunity to give a rare outing to Rachmaninov’s 1902 cantata, Spring. This mixes a bubbling evocation of nature with some heavily over-written brass and choral grandiloquence, setting a nasty Nekrasov poem in which the arrival of spring spares the writer the need to murder his unfaithful wife. Hmmm. Igor Golovatenko was the idiomatic baritone soloist.

Continue reading...