Nielsen’s sixth symphony, his last, composed in honour of his own 60th birthday celebrations in 1925, baffled the critics. Nine decades later the bewilderment shows little sign of abating. It’s a work that veers between bucolic exuberance, glittering brilliance and mystifying passive-aggressive outbursts. Every thread unravels, and even the most brazen moments undermine themselves, such as the jaunty Humoreske, whose mordant clarinet jibes and eerie horn blasts seem to discover the animal characters of Peter and the Wolf having eaten the wrong mushrooms.
Conductor Sakari Oramo’s willingness to embrace the music at face value showed the work in its best light, with heightened contrasts between the velvety strings and more strident brass and woodwind. It also helped that the symphony, in keeping with the other concerts of Oramo’s Nielsen cycle, was presented in strict historical context with Sibelius’s Tapiola, Rachmaninov’s fourth piano concerto and John Foulds’s April, England – all works that share in the great collapse of expressive self-confidence that assailed the European artistic ego in the wake of the first world war.
Self-doubt is certainly the key to understanding the imposing contortions of Rachmaninov’s final concerto. However, Denis Kozhukhin’s playing was sure and sober (and beyond exquisite in his encore, Sgambati’s arrangement of Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits). He was impressively unbowed by Oramo’s occasional indifference to his piano accompaniment. Problems of balance and intonation also marred Sibelius’s brooding walk in the woods, while the orchestra laid out the questionable charms of the Foulds piece with appropriate diffidence.
An oddly unsatisfying concert, then, but perhaps that was the point. There are times when the experience of being fully human is marked by profound existential confusion. In that sense, the task of embracing the agonies of uncertainty is no less a valuable part of the concert hall’s expressive life than its more familiar tragic and triumphant modes.
• Available on BBC iPlayer until 22 June.
