Throughout October, the viola player Antoine Tamestit was the London Symphony Orchestra’s artist-in-focus. After performances of concertos by Walton and Martinů, he closed his residency with the London premiere of the concerto written for him by Jörg Widmann. Tamestit gave the first performance in 2015, and he has since played it some 20 times, very often with Daniel Harding, who was conducting here too.
Widmann’s viola concerto is a substantial piece – a single movement lasting half an hour. It proceeds in picaresque fashion through a series of musical encounters between the soloist and members of the orchestra, during which he moves around the platform, confronting different instruments in turn. It’s an idea that Thea Musgrave used more than half a century ago in her clarinet concerto, but Widmann was inspired by Tamestit himself, who has performed Berlioz’s Harold in Italy with similar peregrinations.
But it begins with the soloist alone at the side of the stage, gently tapping on the body of his instrument, gradually drawing members of the orchestra into the argument. It’s a while before Widmann allows Tamestit to reveal the gorgeous smoky sound that he can draw from his Stradivarius. The viola’s subsequent adventures are undeniably vivid – there are brief flirtations with the harp and bass flute, a fierce encounter with the tuba, a violent outburst from the whole orchestra provoking frantic solo activity, before the wispy, quietly evaporating coda. But though they do make a fine showcase for Tamestit’s outstanding virtuosity, they seem to be a series of self-contained, brilliantly conceived moments, rather than adding up to something more than the sum of their parts.
After the concerto came two programmatic works by Dvořák – the concert overture In Nature’s Realm, and what is perhaps the best known of the five symphonic poems he composed in the mid 1890s, The Golden Spinning Wheel. Both were superbly played by the LSO, the brass particularly outstanding, and Harding’s unfussy approach to the pictorial elements of the poem brought its gruesome narrative very convincingly to life.
• Broadcast on Radio 3 on 4 November, and then available on BBC Sounds until 3 December.
