The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its high-octane music director, Sakari Oramo, are swirling to the end of a brief retrospective of 20th-century English music. "Swirling" is the operative word, for Oramo has chosen to close his final concerts with John Foulds's Three Mantras, a hair-raising piece of exotica, to put it mildly.
Foulds, who died in 1939, was a Mancunian maverick, known in his day for incidental music and salon pieces. Towards the end of his not so long life, he was drawn to oriental philosophy and eventually went AWOL in India, having produced a series of colossal east-west fusion scores, most of which have never been published, some of which are presumed lost. Three Mantras, first performed in 1997, is all that is left of an opera called Avatara. Since it runs for half an hour and formed the prelude, one wonders just how long Foulds intended the opera to be.
He owes his rediscovery, one suspects, to the New Age movement, though if anyone imagines Three Mantras is inherently pacific, they are in for a shock. This is, first and foremost, music of violent flux and ceaseless change, aspiring to portray endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction.
It is the music, in short, of Shiva's eternal dance within the cosmic wheel. Raw, unruly string phrases lacerate the air, answered by savage trumpets. Pounding ostinati build relentlessly and Indian ragas are imploded into western passacaglias. Even when the pace subsides in the glittering, beatific central section, Foulds keeps the uneasy tension going by means of protracted chromatic dissonances.
He has been seen by some as a musical law unto himself, a kind of English Ives - though that isn't strictly true. In idiom, he's a post-Wagnerian tonal extremist. There are echoes of Holst and resonances of Mahler - both of whom were also influenced by eastern philosophy. For Oramo - the wild boy of the podium - Three Mantras is a gift. The CBSO play it with sinewy, extravagant vehemence.
Elsewhere, Oramo's choice of repertory is more conventional, - though his approach is radical. There is no attempt at nostalgia or parochial insularity. Oramo hurls English music kicking and screaming into the European mainstream. He turns Elgar's Cockaigne into a tone poem of spine-tingling Straussian zap, in which, for once, there is not a shred of imperial pomp.
Vaughan Williams's Toward the Unknown Region is similarly shown as owing a debt to Brahms before the composer's own voice finally makes its distinct appearance. Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings asserts a universality of emotion and experience, and Oramo is sensitive to its every flicker of mood. His tenor is Mark Padmore - lithe and elegant, if straining in places - and there are moments of unsteadiness in Radovan Vlatkovic's horn-playing. Oramo sometimes sacrifices finesse to intensity but is unfailingly exciting, and both orchestra and audience clearly adore him.
