GRAMOPHONE Review: English Music For Strings – Sinfonia of London/John Wilson
John Wilson’s reverence for Sir John Barbirolli’s iconic disc of English String Music with the now reborn Sinfonia of London is no great secret. In reclaiming the name and the ethos of the orchestra he could be seen as somehow repaying the gratitude. The players may have changed but the spirit has not. And the sound. Sumptuous is one word – but because this is Wilson that goes hand-in-hand with the keenest articulation. There’s a rosiny immediacy about it all, like being on the podium or better yet inside the sound.
Britten’s dazzling Frank Bridge Variations show us how it’s done, a spooky ability even in his youth to evoke so much from so little. You look at the page and think ‘how does he do that?’ The reach and invention comes from an instinctive understanding of mood and atmosphere. The romantic enchantment of the Adagio, the swagger of the Bourrée Classique, the fiery coloratura of Alla Italiana taken at an insanely showy lick. And the emotional heart of the piece – the Funeral March – where the intensity of the searing upper-reaches of the violins is at once a response to the drum-like throbbing of the basses. The stillness of the closing pages resonates in this performance long after the sound has faded from our hearing. And there is, of course, great kinship with the quietly devastating Bridge Lament which follows – a piano piece turned intimate Great War memorial.
Lennox Berkeley’s Serenade for Strings is another precocious masterwork – not perhaps as conspicuously ‘out there’ in the way Britten hears the string sonority but elegant as befits a pupil of Nadia Boulanger and marked by the audacity to subvert our expectations of a conventional String Serenade by ending with an anxious and intense Lento. The 1930s were fast drawing to a close when Berkeley moved into the old mill at Snape with Britten – and with the gathering clouds of war came this music for an uncertain future. Berkeley’s mournful Lento and the Funeral March from Britten’s Bridge Variations are products of a very particular time and place.
And then there is Sir Arthur Bliss’ ultra-romantic Music for Strings which seems to channel the flamboyance of his score for Alexander Korda’s movie Things to Come (written just before it) and revel in the freedom to make music for its own sake. Wilson and the Sinfonia of London strings point up its inventive spirit – not least the soloistic writing at the close of the first movement (a nod perhaps to Elgar Introduction and Allegro) where solo basses transition to a slow movement marked molto sostenuto. That’s the kind of marking that Wilson and his strings live for and to which they lend their most sonorous tone. Note the ostentatious flourishes within this movement – no extravagance spared – and note too the filmic elaboration towards the close of the finale.
Wilson’s way with strings has come a long way from Hollywood – but the lustre is inescapable.
