Brahms, Schubert, Stravinsky, Portsmouth Guildhall, October 26
The Portsmouth Guildhall accorded Tasmin Little and the BSO an ovation from the top end of their repertoire for a great evening of music featuring a welcome return for Tasmin Little.
The Brahms Violin Concerto was doing nicely enough thank you very much before Tasmin's cadenza in the slow movement grabbed one by the labels with some force and from then on seemed to be on a different level. Superb lightning fingerwork from Tasmin and a concerto that I think probably really does improve as it goes along certainly did tonight. It's always a pleasure and it had been worth it by half-time whatever the second half was going to do.
We were on safe ground with Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, poignant and shimmering with its touch of sturm und drang that forever makes one wonder what the third and fourth movements were going to do. It stops where Schubert left it, perhaps not quite as eerily as Bach's Art of Fugue in which he leaves us just as he is signing his name in the final theme, but nonetheless it is an unintentionally open ending. I mean the boy was only 31.
But the real bonus for me was the much less familiar Firebird by Igor Stravinsky (above), that I had certainly not gone specifically to hear.
By turns skittering and (perhaps) pellucid with harp and woodwind the verisimilitude of a bird, it made my neighbour in C11 jump out of that seat when we reached the identifiably Igor riot in a brief middle section. But then, the bird's dying embers are gorgeously described with a song on the cello, a plaintive repeated riff on the harp and the tuba over at the back inserting a mute that brought tears to one's eyes just to see it. The programmatic music comes to a wonderful climax to finish a monumental piece that was a revelation to me and a tremendous finale to another fine concert. Get there if you can to see them. They are an orchestra in top form.
I think I said that the last time I saw them.