United Kingdom Berlioz and Brahms: Sophie Bevan (soprano), Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra / Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor). Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford 18.1.2024. (CR)

Berlioz – Overture to Béatrice et Bénédict; Les nuits d’été, Op.7
Brahms Symphony No.2 in D main, Op.73

On a chilly January night time, Brahms’s most ebullient and outgoing symphony, and Berlioz’s musing on summer season nights proved a super balm, particularly in these pliable performances.

Within the cycle of songs, setting poems by Théophile Gautier, Ryan Wigglesworth set a delightfully poised and subdued temper with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra for these haunted reminiscences of previous or thwarted love, a few of them spectral and morbid. However somewhat than offering a merely snug or anodyne background for Sophie Bevan, conductor and orchestra actively shaded the music in order to offer its personal kaleidoscope of refined tones and colors, like a watercolour portray, tellingly flaring up into brighter beams of sunshine at important moments. Contrariwise shifts of timbre in the other way, such because the ghostly harmonics for the outline of a passing shadow in ‘Au cimetière’, made the listener shudder.

Bevan maintained exemplary management over all six songs, virtually all the time sotto voce however persistently projecting a finely etched phrase and rarely turning into crackly, even within the extra staccato strategy to the sprightly opening tune’ Villanelle’. When her voice opened out right into a extra rounded tone it was performed to deliberate impact to stress shifts in register or temper inside the textual content, most notably for the extra joyful disposition of the final tune, ‘L’île inconnue’, the place her and the orchestra’s bolder colors dispelled the gloomier shades of the previous songs. On the live performance’s opening, the overture to Berlioz’s final opera, Béatrice et Bénédict, offered a extra wryly, ironic tackle the vicissitudes of romantic love. The comparatively lean sound of the orchestra and restrained used of vibrato instilled a way of nervousness and warning in its scurrying opening part, broadening out into emotional heat and lodging within the slower part, enabling a thawing out within the recapitulation.

Wigglesworth tended to domesticate that trimness of sonority in Brahms’s Symphony No.2, somewhat than forcing any of the textural heft it undoubtedly encompasses. Once more, comparatively sparing use of vibrato, and the col legno assault of the violins within the second topic gave the primary motion a sure brittle and brisk character, with a richer timbre held again to make a larger impact within the extra passionate Adagio second motion. However the antiphonal association of the violins all the time enabled the violas and cellos to weave a sustained, expressive line inside the centre of the music to take care of lyricism and witfulness, joined by winsome solo contributions from horn and oboe within the gradual motion.

In essentially the most light-hearted of all Brahms’s symphonic actions, the jollity of the Allegretto got here out as a lot by means of fastidiously honed gradations in dynamics and tone color as from studied articulation or rhythm. Most forceful distinction was unleashed between the relaxed opening phrase of the finale, adopted by an explosive, impetuous outburst, however nonetheless contained sufficient in order to return over as consciously witty or perhaps a sensible joke, drawing a hyperlink with Brahms’s Viennese predecessor Haydn, somewhat than Beethoven with whose symphonies that od the composer are so typically in contrast. A blazing peroration rightly set the seal on a good-mannered account of the work, drawing consideration to the relative novelty that the climax comes virtually too late, with cheery triumph within the symphony’s final seconds.

Curtis Rogers