News and Reviews

Review: sinfonia ViVA with Freddy Kempf, piano plus After:HOURS concert with Thomas Gould, violin
Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham - Tuesday 16th March 2010

Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin got sinfonia ViVA's concert off to an elegant start, with a lovely rippling sense of motion in the first movement. Graceful playing made the Forlane really feel like a dance, while the Minuet's underlying vein of sadness was given just enough weight. Conductor André de Ridder set a very fast pace for the final Rigaudon, occasionally at the expense of some detail, but the orchestra responded with brilliant, incisive playing.

In Schumann's Piano Concerto, neither the orchestra nor soloist Freddy Kempf took anything for granted. After the initial flourish there was a nice sense of hesitancy before the performance started to gather momentum. The changing moods were not allowed to become episodic but were welded into an organic whole. The finale was treated with an infectious vigour and joie de vivre, with plenty of rhythmic impetus. A full-blooded performance, it nevertheless preserved the music’s essential poetry.

Since January Anna Meredith has been working with ViVA under the Royal Philharmonic Society and PRS for Music Foundation's 'Composer in the House' scheme. Her short work Fringeflower was full of captivating detail right from the opening horn duet, and bodes well for her future work with the orchestra.

Beethoven's Second Symphony ended the evening in a performance of highly-charged dynamism, with a flowing second movement and a finale that crackled with energy.

After a break came another in the series of 'After Hours' concerts, featuring another Anna Meredith work, Charged, for solo violin. Stiff with virtuoso techniques, like a latter-day Paganini Caprice, it had a responsive interpreter in Thomas Gould, who found the expressivity amid the brusque gestures. He returned with players from ViVA for Nico Muhly's Seeing is Believing, a single-movement, twenty-minute concerto for six-string electric violin and an ensemble of fourteen players. Making effective use of both the cello-like tone of the solo instrument's lowest strings, and electronic looping devices, it built convincingly from its lyrical opening, with elements of minimalism absorbed into a wide-ranging discourse.

Review by Mike Wheeler