Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/ Candillari review – Simpson’s oratorio shrieks; Elgar and Sibelius stay polite
📖 Full Retelling
<p><strong>Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool</strong><br>Elgar’s more-tea-vicar salon Victoriana sat primly beside Simpson’s cataclysmic celebration of occultism, while Sibelius’s climactic payoff needed a bigger buildup</p><p>Elgar’s much-loved Serenade for Strings was given its unofficial 1892 premiere by the amateurs of the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class. The perfect piece of salon Victoriana, it was an ideal more-tea-vicar, bone-china-and-bread-and-butter s
Entity Intersection Graph
No entity connections available yet for this article.
Original Source
Review Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/ Candillari review – Simpson’s oratorio shrieks; Elgar and Sibelius stay polite Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool Elgar’s more-tea-vicar salon Victoriana sat primly beside Simpson’s cataclysmic celebration of occultism, while Sibelius’s climactic payoff needed a bigger buildup E lgar’s much-loved Serenade for Strings was given its unofficial 1892 premiere by the amateurs of the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class. The perfect piece of salon Victoriana, it was an ideal more-tea-vicar, bone-china-and-bread-and-butter scene-setter for the cataclysmic eruptions of Mark Simpson’s The Immortal. Inspired by Victorian occultism, Simpson’s 2015 oratorio invites its audience to a Victorian seance. Texts collated by Melanie Challenger represent the scattered anxieties, pleas and nonsense of the automatic writing produced by mediums of the time. Against these are set the words of Frederic Myers: founder of the Society for Psychical Research, obsessed with the afterlife since the suicide of his childhood sweetheart. Nineteenth-century mediums could only deploy concealed wires and the odd bit of ectoplasm for atmosphere; Simpson has a whole orchestra – complete with harp and a battery of percussion – choir and solo baritone at his disposal. The texture has actually been thinned down since the premiere a decade ago, but this is still a work of impossibly dense, deliberately impenetrable, apocalyptic textures. You watch bows moving, wind breathing, but cannot identify their sounds in the mix. Conductor Daniela Candillari (making her RLPO debut) kept all controlled, but between the amplified howls and shrieks of the vocalists of Exaudi and excellent soloist Rory Musgrave (also amplified, unnecessarily) it was hard to find much to grasp hold of in a piece that’s a sequence of self-contained episodes that neither develop nor narrate. The opening Elgar was intimate to a fault – gentle, dainty – even that nagging little viola rhythm more bumblebee than wasp...
Read full article at source