Huw Watkins's new piano concerto, which he premiered with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Martyn Brabbins, presents a paradox. His programme note suggests that the work makes no reference to any drama outside the development of its themes and motifs, as if it is a complete, self-contained work of modernist abstraction. And yet the music's gestures and rhetoric are far from modernist, or even postmodernist.
In fact, the piece refers to a conflict between soloist and orchestra familiar from romantic and early 20th-century concertos. Watkins's harmonic language may be densely chromatic, but it remains reliant on pitch centres and tonality. And he resurrects another, earlier model: that of the virtuoso showpiece. Born in 1976, Watkins is already a superbly proficient pianist as well as a composer, and he negotiated the fiendish difficulties of the solo part with compelling authority.
The concerto is cast in three movements, following the conventional pattern of two fast sections framing a central slow movement. Within these overfamiliar outlines, Watkins manipulates his material with clarity and confidence. The first movement is a dynamic mix of assertive chords and short, explosive motifs. The most striking passage of the second movement is its ending: the music dissipates in a serene string line floating above the texture. In the finale, the piano is caught in a vortex of ever-changing time-signatures, but the music's momentum culminates in an impressive, barnstorming coda. There was no doubt that Watkins was the star of this performance, but Brabbins led the BBCNOW players in a powerful account of his concise concerto.
Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes: A Time There Was . . . is another piece that is closely connected to older musical traditions. But instead of using folk tunes as emblems of pastoral bliss, Britten transforms them into symbols of ambiguity and loss. Brabbins captured the austerity of the third movement, Hankin Booby, with its acerbic drums and brass, and created a vivid lament in the final movement, Lord Melbourne.
