ORION SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, CADOGAN HALL, LONDON
By Michael Church
Independent
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
UK
The Orion Symphony Orchestra draws its players from all four London
conservatoires, and the Sonitus Chamber Choir, which joined it for
this event, does likewise; several past principals from the elite
National Youth Orchestra are among their ranks.
Another night, another student orchestra.
If you want to learn the secret of classical music’s perennial good
health, look no further. The conservatoires are bristling with talent,
and it’s bursting to display itself. The Orion Symphony Orchestra
draws its players from all four London conservatoires, and the Sonitus
Chamber Choir, which joined it for this event, does likewise; several
past principals from the elite National Youth Orchestra are among
their ranks. One of the purposes of this orchestra is to promote
‘unjustly forgotten masterpieces’, and another is to give the players
experience of working under real-world pressure: three rehearsals are
all they get before a concert, as opposed to the luxurious week they
have in college.
The forgotten work on this occasion was an opera by one of
Shostakovich’s students, Veniamin Fleishman, who was killed in
action in 1941. Shostakovich dutifully completed it, and Orion’s
artistic director Toby Purser has now devised an orchestral suite
from it. The result feels like=2 0echt Shostakovich in boisterous
mood, with circus oompah and distinct melodic echoes of Prokofiev:
it may not be a masterpiece, but it was worth this outing, and it
did provide a showcase for the beautiful sound which the leader of
the orchestra, Asthgik Vardanyan, can create. Her Armenian name may
denote Armenian training, which would explain that sound.
The rest of the programme was stunning. Benjamin Britten’s ‘Suite
on English Folk Tunes’ was his last orchestral work, and in its
extraction of maximum effect from minimal means it displays the hand
of the master.
Under Purser’s incisive beat the orchestra created Britten’s
characteristically translucent textures, and the ancient songs and
dances – with their often Stravinskyan colouring – came sweetly
across. In Tippett’s Negro spirituals from ‘A Child of Our Time’,
the orchestral/choral/solo sound had at times a burnished perfection,
and here Stephanie Edwards, the soprano soloist, was outstanding,
with floated high notes which rode with ease over brass, strings,
percussion, and choir. One of my personal blind spots is the syrupy
English sentimentality of works like Vaughan Williams’s ‘Serenade to
Music’, but here that piece was played so well that I almost found
myself liking it.
It was a nice idea to end with one of Shostakovich’s least-known
symphonies. His Ninth was written in defiance of the political
commissars at the end of the Second World War, and is shot through
with ambiguity. The way Purser and his players negotiated the sinister
muted waltz in the second movement, and the grotesquerie of the last,
was masterly.