Rumon Gamba is one of the younger generation of conductors honing a good relationship with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and, as he stepped into the breach to replace their indisposed conductor laureate Tadaaki Otaka, adrenalin ran high.
This manifested itself primarily in a performance of Walton's First Symphony that had about it a young man's vigour. Gamba conveyed the restless energy of the work, but also its underlying sense of anguish. This symphony was nearly stymied bywriter's block and it is surely no coincidence that the brilliant cut and thrust of the finale's fugal writing (suggested by Constant Lambert as a means of transition to the restatement of the majestic opening music that Walton had already conceived) also risks being a stumbling block in performance. Gamba's achievement here was to build a naturally flowing momentum, so that Philippe Schartz's final trumpet solo emerged without a trace of artifice and the ultimate climax with a genuine sense of triumph.
There was an obvious sympathy between Gamba and the French violinist Olivier Charlier in Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. Charlier is a persuasive advocate of his fellow countryman's music, but here he evoked the spirit of the 19th-century Spanish virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate, for whom Lalo wrote the concerto.
Charlier may have lost his flamboyant ponytail, but the dark sculpted head, his dancing rhythms and the raw, earthy sound all contributed to a real gypsy bravura.
Seeing Charlier, perhaps composer Alun Hoddinott (present in the audience for another in his 75th birthday series) had a moment of nostalgia for his first career as a solo violinist. That background always informs his orchestral style, but his penchant for basing music on literary sources is also characteristic. Lines from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were the inspiration for The Sun, the Great Luminary of the Universe, written in 1970.
Gamba made its sequence of sombre images of doom carry a relentlessly apocalyptic resonance, never more so than in the brass's reflection of Joyce's "brazen death of time".
