Aldeburgh festival ended with musical fireworks to celebrate not just the culmination of this year's programme but also the 50th birthday of Oliver Knussen. An ex-artistic director of the festival, Knussen conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Snape Maltings Concert Hall in a programme that reflected his influences as a composer and his enthusiasms as a conductor.
Stravinsky's Feu d'Artifice (Fireworks) was a blazing rocket of orchestral energy as swirls of colour flew from one section to another. Knussen's own Flourish with Fireworks, written in 1988 as a response to the Russian composer's mastery of orchestration, made a perfect counterpart: there are even some reminiscences of Feu d'Artifice in Knussen's riotous, five-minute score. But these are subsumed into an orchestral texture that surpasses even Stravinsky in its luminous detail. There was more of Knussen's lucid poetry in his Whitman Settings, sung by soprano Rosemary Hardy, with the music mirroring the eagles and spiders of the texts.
At the centre of the programme was the European premiere of Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto. Knussen is arguably the leading champion of Carter's late music, and he led the BBCSO in a superbly authoritative performance. The soloist was Fred Sherry, who worked closely with Carter during the composition of the piece (which was completed in 2000, when the composer was 91). Like so many of Carter's recent works, the 20-minute concerto is a model of expressive and structural clarity. But what is individual about it is the relationship between soloist and orchestra. The cello plays almost throughout the piece, and the part is full of heightened lyricism (even if Sherry sounded underpowered in the resonant acoustic of the Maltings). The orchestral writing is designed to be in opposition to the cello part: there are percussive, staccato stabs and fragmented bursts of energy. Even when cello and orchestra finally come together in the slow, central section, the effect is of tragedy rather than resolution. The end of the concerto returns to the textural dissonance of the opening.
But even next to this impressive premiere, the most memorable performance of the programme was Knussen's electrifying account of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. He revealed the inner workings of this huge score with laser-like accuracy. His pacing of the whole structure was equally fascinating: he chose uncompromisingly fast speeds, and created an overpowering cumulative effect.
