The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday April 19 2007
The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra played Victory Stride as an encore at Colston Hall in Bristol, not Sweet Georgia Brown as we said in the article below. This has been corrected.
While the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra has always enjoyed a strong following in Bristol, the inspirational Marin Alsop has given it a real fanbase. The loyalty factor permits her to take risks, and they invariably come off.
This all-American programme was constructed to create the optimum atmosphere for a Copland piece with a tricky performing history. A first half of Gershwin - with Simon Trpceski the precise-yet-passionate pianist in Rhapsody in Blue - guaranteed a general high, so that after the interval Alsop could present Copland's Symphony No 2 to a far more willing audience than might otherwise have been the case.
The symphony, dating from the early 1930s, is known as the Short, though it was clearly too long for its early exponents: many performances were cancelled when orchestras were floored by the complex rhythms and acerbity of the outer movements. Making light of the difficulties, the Bournemouth forces brought to it taut discipline and a rich tone, which offset the often uncompromising nature of the music.
Opening the concert with Gershwin's An American in Paris helped set another context for the piece, for it was Copland's period of study in 1920s Paris that marked his compositional thinking. In the Short Symphony, he could be heard shaking off the influence of Nadia Boulanger and discovering his own voice. Alsop shaped the spare melodic lines with an elegant sweep. Bernstein's Symphonic Suite from his score for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront completed this sequence, with both the oppression and tenderness of the narrative emerging as strongly as the epic quality.
Trpceski had breezily given Dave Brubeck's Take Five as an encore; Alsop trumped the Bernstein with a wonderful arrangement of Victory Stride. It was calculated to bring the house down, and it did.
