Grace, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s new concert series, is named for its focus on one of the Wales’s foremost composers, Grace Williams, whose substantial output is only recently beginning to be properly appreciated. Her Second Symphony, written in 1956 and performed here in her 1975 revision, is energised and belies the depression that beset her for much of her life, brought on by the feeling that, as a woman, she was treated as a second-class composer. As though to prove the point, the BBC Radio 3 broadcast’s interval extract of her opera The Parlour was mis-credited on its website to Geoffrey Williams.
The commitment the orchestra and conductor Martyn Brabbins brought to the symphony was notable: the first movement’s brass writing – trumpet almost a signature instrument for Williams – bold and direct, the militaristic overtones implied in its Allegro Marziale resonating all too clearly in these warring times. Even in the slow movement with Steve Hudson’s haunting oboe solo, an underlying unease lingered. Yet nothing showed Williams’ command of her medium as comprehensively as the finale with its deeply expressive Largo growing into an even more emotionally charged soundscape, its ending emphatic and defiant.
This series is also highlighting emerging talent, and BBC NOW’s composer-affiliate Sarah Lianne Lewis’s 2018 work The Sky Didn’t Fall was premiered here. Similarly threaded with Celtic melancholy and inspired by Irish writer Kerry Hardie’s poem After My Father Died, the pain of bereavement is contrasted with a hyper-awareness of life. Lewis created ongoing tensions in her vividly contrasting textures, its resolution cathartic, if not consoling. BBC NOW violinist Emilie Godden, in her conducting debut, was authoritative.
Brabbins conducted the concert’s most moving piece, Kaija Saariaho’s Suite from Emilie, drawn from her monodrama celebrating the uncompromising passions and genius of the 18th-century French philosopher and mathematician Emilie du Châtelet. She would die at 42 from puerperal fever and the suite of five movements reflects her premonitions of her demise, desperate to complete her translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia – she did – and to counter the oblivion conferred by death. The finesse of Saaiaho’s writing was mesmerising, as was the beauty of Emma Tring’s high soprano. But in the hall, the words were not sufficiently audible – text and translation were only available digitally, a somewhat post hoc arrangement – frustrating in any context, and particularly this one.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 1 December.
