Amid the daily reports of man’s inhumanity to man, it was a welcome relief to spend two hours in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall with this life-affirming programme from the BBC Philharmonic under chief conductor John Storgårds. The UK premieres of two BBC commissions, flanked by Copland’s rousing Fanfare for the Common Man and Nielsen’s titanic intrepid Fourth Symphony – “The Inextinguishable” – offered plenty of intellectual red meat and enough adrenalin-charged jollies to lift the most downtrodden spirits.
James Lee III likes to contemplate contemporary issues through the prism of history. In the Michigan-born composer’s piano concerto, Shades of Unbroken Dreams, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech serves as a launchpad to reflect the ongoing struggle for equal rights, especially, he says, for people of colour and women. Cast in three movements, it opens with a vivid exploration of dreams, calm and troubled, before quarrying King’s text and ending in a blaze of optimism.
Lee’s shiftily chromatic musical language and gift for colourful orchestration includes allusions to African drumming and the occasional nod to minimalism. In an accessible, crowd-pleasing work, episodes of Ravelian delicacy jostle with bellicose marches and celebratory climaxes of immense power that narrowly avoid toppling over into bombast. Alexandra Dariescu was the muscular soloist, plunging into dialectical games with the orchestra and taking the demanding piano writing in her stride.
In contrast, the sobriety of Sebastian Fagerlund’s Helena’s Song for violin and orchestra felt a trifle pale, though the Finnish composer’s music is certainly multihued. Storgårds was the violinist here, dividing his attention between the solo line and conducting the orchestra in a surefooted, if slightly self-effacing performance.
There was certainly nothing shy about the barnstorming brass and percussion in Copland’s musical pat on the back for the ordinary men and women who inevitably end up doing the politicians’ dirty work. Nor in the Nielsen, which received an electrifying, edge-of-the-seat performance. From the urgent, opulent opening to the duelling timpanists who begin the finale, Storgårds squeezed every ounce of drama from the score’s schizophrenic twists and turns. With the Philharmonic firing on all cylinders, it was an earthshattering performance of an under-programmed masterwork.