The Philharmonia closed their 80th-anniversary season in style with a pair of late-Romantic big hitters and the UK premiere of a seven-movement piano concerto by Turkish composer Fazil Say. With nature at its heart, the programme journeyed from the frozen wastes of Finland to the sun-kissed woodlands of Bohemia and beyond.
En Saga, a last-minute substitute for Falla’s Love the Magician, was Sibelius’s first tone poem, poorly received in 1893 but successfully revised nine years later. The composer refused to furnish any specific literary explanations, yet the colourful score is redolent with imagery, from patriotic pageantry to dusky forests and midnight sleigh rides. It proved meat and drink to fellow Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Plunging into its shadowy dramas, the conductor sustained the musical momentum effortlessly across its substantial arc while striking some fantastical podium attitudes of his own to tease out its more theatrical effects.
According to the composer, Say’s Mother Earth was conceived as “a dramatic wakeup call in the fight to avoid a climate crisis”. Framed by a prelude and a postlude, and including a midpoint interlude, its four remaining movements are labelled Earth, Forest, Sea and River. Where Sibelius evokes, Say prefers to depict. Thunderous percussion portrays earthquakes and landslips; handheld devices imitate birdcalls; and peas rolled on a drum suggest wind and waves. At its best, as in the seismic stomp of Earth, or in Forest, with its tropical, Latin-infused rhythms, the music was exhilarating, if a trifle obvious.
The piano part, played by Say himself, roamed from easygoing and slightly bluesy to angsty and fraught, the last calling for some virtuoso playing. Especially intriguing were haunting, zither-like passages that required the soloist to play with only his left hand while stretching his right hand inside the piano to manipulate the strings.
If Say’s work sounds a warning, Dvořák’s melodious Eighth Symphony is almost entirely upbeat. The Philharmonia gave it a big-boned but elastically phrased workout, with meaty string tone – especially the cellos – and secure, full-bodied horns. Balancing Brahmsian classicism with piquant folk idioms, Rouvali’s sure-footed interpretation was amiable and urgent; often jaunty, but always elegant.
