The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's concert on Tuesday was part of a new-year series in which Sakari Oramo will conduct all of Schumann's symphonies. But even though Schumann was its focus, it was still not a safe haven from the pervasive William Walton centenary celebrations.
The Violin Concerto is one of the handful of Walton's enduring repertory works that will have to be endlessly recycled to provide enough programmes for the plethora of anniversary concerts. It is an interesting, transitional piece: it leaves behind the swaggering machismo of Belshazzar's Feast and the First Symphony, the two major orchestral scores that preceded it. And, in its sour-sweet lyricism, sometimes spiced by major-minor ambiguities in the harmony, it offers a prewar anticipation of the style that Walton would adopt in his opera Troilus and Cressida and his orchestral music of the 1950s.
The soloist was Akiko Suwanai, who won the Moscow Tchaikovsky competition a decade ago and clearly possesses the formidable technique of a major prizewinner. The accuracy of her assault on the double-stopping in the first movement's development section was hair-raising. But there was something a bit steely about the way in which she projected the melodies that course through the concerto; they demand a bit more charm and allure than she provided, and it all became a bit intimidating.
Schumann is the kind of 19th-century romantic composer to whom one might expect Oramo to be drawn: the irrepressible energy and the unpredictability of the music might well strike a chord with his approach to conducting. The Manfred Overture at the beginning of the evening was well played, and starkly dramatic in the right places, but didn't suggest any special affinity. The D minor Fourth Symphony, however, was very fine. It is easily the most thematically integrated of all Schumann's orchestral works and Oramo ensured that coherence was maintained, projecting it in a single, overarching span that tied in all the loose ends, and driving the last movement to an uplifting and superbly delivered apotheosis.
