With a no-nonsense practicality that so far seems to have eluded concert organisers in London, Britten Pears Arts has launched a series of concerts with live audiences in its magnificent concert hall at Snape Maltings. Each Friday, Saturday and Sunday the series will offer three short programmes, each performed twice to a dispersed audience of 150.
Initially, the plan was to feature artists who were due to appear at this year’s cancelled Aldeburgh festival and summer Proms, but it’s now been extended and will continue each weekend for as long as necessary. As well as including chamber music and song, there will be orchestral performances, such as this one, in which Antonio Pappano conducted a group of socially distanced string players from the London Philharmonic.
There are few more welcoming venues for anyone’s first live concert in five months than the Maltings, and few better acoustics in which to hear a string orchestra, too. In both Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the string-orchestra version of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, there was a wonderful warmth to the sound as well as a wealth of inner detail. For the Schoenberg, too, an orchestra of just 22 provided a fine compromise between the lean intensity of the original sextet version and a performance with full-scale orchestral strings, which can sometimes seem too lush and soft-edged.
Both the soloists in the Serenade, tenor Toby Spence and the LPO’s principal horn, John Ryan, seemed to relish the cycle’s contemplative moments more than the dramatic ones. Even the setting of Blake’s Sick Rose and the Lyke-Wake Dirge straight after it kept something in reserve, but the closing moments were as magical as ever, with Spence gently steering the Keats sonnet to its close and Ryan adding his offstage epilogue.
Between the two works there was an extra item. Momentum is an initiative launched by the soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan in which established artists invite up-and-coming performers to share the concert platform with them. Here Pappano turned pianist to accompany the Ukrainian baritone Yuriy Yurchuk in songs by Georgy Sviridov and Rimsky-Korsakov, and Yeletsky’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. It was a tantalising sample of Yurchuk’s velvety dark sound, and his fine way with a lyrical line.
