Unity of Being - Deirdre Gribbin
Violin Concerto - Berg
Symphony No 2 (Lobgesang) - Mendelssohn
Thierry Fischer launched his first season as principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra on Friday with the first of the "Visions of Utopia" programmes, which dominate the orchestra's activity until next May. Deirdre Gribbin's Unity of Being, specially commissioned for the occasion, takes its inspiration from a phrase by Yeats. The new work, she says, is "my peace anthem, a hope for a better future".
Berg's Violin Concerto, completed just before his death in 1935, incorporates elements of tonal harmony with 12-tone technique, enabling Berg to quote one of Bach's most dissonant chorale harmonisations, Es ist genug, without the clash of musical worlds that might have been expected. In another sort of multi-layering, the piece has more recently been discovered to be infused with coded references to Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, with whom he was having an affair.
Mendelssohn's Symphony No 2, the Hymn of Praise (Symphony-Cantata was the composer's own description), is a setting of Biblical texts, and was written in 1840 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the invention of printing, a process the composer valued for its dissemination of the Bible.
Three orchestral movements are followed by a nine-movement cantata in a work that has provoked unfavourable comparisons with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and which has long fallen from the popularity it commanded in the 19th century.
Gribbin's Unity of Being contrasts sections of untrammeled energy and calmer interludes before ending with a quietness that seems to avoid a real sense of resolution. In Friday's performance, the loud writing tended towards a chaotic drumming and blasting in which only the percussion and brass really registered, though the strings and woodwind were visibly very active. The work's inner-directed, low brass chorale with string interjections made the strongest impression on a first hearing.
The performance of the Berg violin concerto was oddly polarised, too, with soloist Augustin Dumay inhabiting a world of Viennese warmth, and Fischer leading the orchestra in a bleaker atmosphere of pained resignation. The contrast was fascinating, but not persuasive.
Fischer worked hard at sustaining Mendelssohn's upbeat vision, adopting an approach that was pacy in the faster sections and uncloyingly delicate in repose.
But moment-by-moment the performance failed to sustain itself. Mendelssohn's invention, so perfect in its own way, simply doesn't here have the sparks that ignite the Scottish or Italian symphonies.
The Belfast Philharmonic Choir, heavily balanced in favour of the sopranos, were more ardent than convincing, and it was the agreeably light-voiced tenor soloist, Kenneth Tarver, who most consistently found his way to the heart of the composer's concerns.
