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Review: sinfonia ViVA ensemble at Buxton Festival
St. John's Church, Buxton - Wednesday 21st July 2010

For their annual visit to the Buxton Festival, sinfonia ViVA put together a programme of music for strings by three great opera composers (all of whom featured, one way or another, in the Festival's opera programme this year). The difference is, of course, that while for Mozart and Richard Strauss instrumental music was as important as their operatic output, for Verdi it was barely even a sideline.

All the same, his E minor String Quartet (heard here in Yuli Turovsky's version for string orchestra) is a substantial piece, even though it makes no claim to Beethovenian profundity. ViVA's performance was robust and vigorous in the first movement, elegant in the second. They brought out the serenade-like quality of the third movement trio, and the fugal textures of the finale were pointed up with wit and precision.

The concert opened with Mozart's Divertimento in D, K136, which, like its two companions, K137 and 138, is so often treated as a warm-up to be trotted through before getting on to the real business of the evening. Instead ViVA and conductor Nicholas Kok handled it with real care and attention, with all repeats – second halves of all three movements as well as first – in place. The outer movements were bright and chirpy, while the central andante, taken at a nicely flowing tempo, was played with real poise.

The centrepiece was Strauss's Metamorphosen, his lament for the destruction inflicted on German culture during World War 2. ViVA's performance – both rich in sound and intricately detailed – gave the music real dignity, and even found a positive tone in the middle section (Strauss reliving the glory days? Aspirations for better times ahead, even?) before the clouds closed in again for the work's tragic ending.

After the interval came the String Sextet that opens Strauss's last opera, Capriccio, in which the players captured a mood I can only describe, paradoxically, as a kind of relaxed intensity.

Review by Mike Wheeler