Cheers and applause are all very well, but on a special occasion a little something extra is called for. At the end of Sunday's Symphony Hall 10th birthday concert there were flowers and champagne for Sakari Oramo, as well as hearty clapping from the near-capacity audience.
Was it all deserved? Oramo is at his most acute and forceful in 20th-century music. The three works played here gave excellent opportunities for him to show off his strengths: precision (he has one of the clearest beats of any conductor currently working in this country), fine orchestral balance and tight control of long musical phrases.
If I found myself day-dreaming in the early stages of the Suite from Stravinsky's The Firebird, that may have been because the preceding work, Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, came across with such exceptional power. I've rarely been entirely convinced by the young Britten's homage to Mahler the symphonist. In most performances the grand gestures have a tendency to go limp when they ought to be at their most bold and assertive. But this was a gripping performance, with a pervading sense of bleak grandeur. It was also very well played by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. I'm not sure even Simon Rattle could have made such a thoroughly impressive case for it.
On the other hand, Rattle would probably have made more of the mysterious early pages of The Firebird. It was not until the superb Infernal Dance that everything came fully into focus. Some of the percussion playing could have been a little tighter, but the energy was irresistible.
Soon afterwards, in the hushed tremolos at the end of the Lullaby, came one of those moments when the justly famous Symphony Hall acoustic brings out the best in the CBSO strings - a magical, soft, velvety sound, of a kind you'd rarely (if ever) hear in any London venue.
Finally there was Janacek's roof-raising Sinfonietta. It was never less than good and, in the concluding movement, it achieved something of the spine-tingling power of Oramo's Sinfonia da Requiem. (It says a lot for Oramo that he persuaded the strings to throw themselves so enthusiastically into the fearfully taxing figurations that go on for page after page; did Janacek bear a grudge against string players?) The long build-up and triumphant return of the opening brass fanfares were manoeuvred expertly. The audience plainly loved it.
