The BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the City of London Sinfonia share Richard Hickox as principal conductor, and the two orchestras are also sharing a short Britten and Shostakovich series at the Barbican over the next two months. For the Welsh orchestra it is a rare opportunity for London exposure outside of its annual tour of duty at the Proms. In its opening programme on Tuesday there was far more Britten than Shostakovich - a group of pieces from the 1930s and early 1940s, most of them composed while Britten was living in the US, combined with the Russian's suite from Katerina Ismailova, the politically corrected version of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
Early Britten is fascinating stuff, full of influences and models being examined and either assimilated or rejected, as he gradually brought together the elements of his personal language. In the Piano Concerto, the flavours come from Prokofiev (his piano concertos and ballets) and Ravel (the Concerto for Left Hand and La Valse); in the wracked Sinfonia da Requiem it is the Austro-German tradition of Mahler and, especially, of Berg. Those are well-known, if somewhat underplayed pieces, but Hickox also conducted two rarities.
The curious brass processional Russian Funeral, combining a Mahlerian-style death march with a Soviet revolutionary song, pre-dates Britten's American sojourn; it was written for a concert by the London Labour Choral Union in 1936. The American Overture was composed in New York in 1941, then lost; when it was rediscovered (in New York Public Library) Britten claimed to have no memory of it, perhaps because he had recycled some of the procedures (the work briskly puts each section of the orchestra through its paces) and even some of the material for the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra five years later.
Hickox and the BBCNOW delivered all these pieces and the Shostakovich suite of entr'actes with gutsy directness; what the performances occasionally lacked in finesse they more than made up for in rhythmic vigour and punch. Barry Douglas was the first-rate soloist in the concerto; though he was occasionally overwhelmed by the orchestra (it is a rather clamorous piece), he handled all the bravura and tricky gear changes with cool, unfussy efficiency.
