The centrepiece of Edward Gardner’s latest concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra was the first UK performance of Brett Dean’s Cello Concerto, written for Alban Gerhardt, who gave the world premiere in Sydney in 2018, and also played it here. Dean and Gerhardt have been friends and colleagues for some years, regularly playing chamber music together. Dean’s Huntington Eulogy, for cello and piano, was also composed for Gerhardt and pianist Steven Osborne in 2001. The new concerto is consequently very much tailored to Gerhardt’s virtuosic yet subtle style.
In a programme note, Dean describes it as “more about collaboration than conflict, with ideas from the cello being amplified by the orchestra,” which broadly captures its methodology, but doesn’t quite convey the music’s ambivalence of mood or its curious mix of playfulness and intensity. Cast in a single movement divided into five sections, it starts almost as a game with fragments of what sounds like birdsong shuttled between cellist and orchestra. But after a lyrical slow section suggesting concord, two contrasting allegros, exhilarating then violent, gradually threaten the cello’s prominence. The ending is remarkable, as slithering trills, shared between soloist and the orchestral cellos, suggest an uneasy truce of sorts. Fantastically difficult, it was a real tour de force for Gerhardt, who played it from memory, very unusual for a contemporary work. Gardner conducted with tremendous energy, all the while alert to the details of Dean’s complex, at times dense, orchestration.
Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony were its companion pieces, both written in the shadow of the second world war, and each, in very different ways, expressing desires and hopes for peace. Gardner has long been an outstanding Britten interpreter, and Sinfonia da Requiem was tremendous as the visceral immediacy of its first two movements gave way to the calm contemplation of eternity with which it ends. The LPO played the Vaughan Williams with quite astonishing beauty, as Gardner carefully probed the ambiguities and tensions beneath its surface before finally bringing it to a close in a mood of utter serenity.
