Classical review: St Magnus: BBC SO Strings & Mayfield Singers, Kirkwall
St Magnus: BBC SO Strings & Mayfield Singers
St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall
* * * *
It is the piece on which Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which was heard seamlessly in the wake of the original.
The sonority of the BBC SO strings is rich and lustrous, and reached out to the packed audience with warmth. Conductor Andrew Gourlay approached the Vaughan Williams with expansive elegance, ever mindful of the music’s forward moving flow.
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Hide AdStrauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings allowed individual voices of the orchestra to be heard and, with upper strings standing to play, they are an impressive ensemble. Gourlay directed this intensely moving music with growing tension, as if it was a broad arc of Strauss’s outpouring of grief following the 1943 bombing of Munich’s opera house.
In contrast, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro zipped along with exhilaration, the players responding to Gourlay’s finely detailed direction with their instruments singing out Elgar’s wonderfully lyrical lines. In this final concert of their first St Magnus Festival residency the BBC SO once more showed why they have been such a hit with Orkney audiences.