Mirga's Triumphant Return with Birmingham UK Orchestra
/By Truman C. Wang
10/16/2022
Photo credit: Benjamin Ealovega
Conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason share a couple of similarities. Both owed their international stardom to celebrity connections: Gustavo Dudamel for the former, Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding for the latter. And both have ‘three’ names that don’t quite roll off the tongue easily. But remarkably, their dynamic performances often left people so impressed that they endeavored to commit the artists’ names to memory. In the conductor’s case, Mirga is on first-name basis with many L.A. Phil concertgoers who fondly remember her as one of their own, a former Dudamel Fellow and Associate Conductor.
Personally, I would like to see talented Mirga as an orchestra builder who turns a provincial band into an international ensemble, as Sir Simon Rattle had done with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the 1980’s. But that is not possible in today’s global jet-setting age and ephemeral social media, where a hot young artist does not stay in one place for long before moving on up. After six years at the helm of Birmingham, Mirga is taking her UK orchestra to the U.S. for an eight-city farewell tour (Los Angeles being their third stop on Wednesday, October 12.)
At the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Birmingham orchestra played to a smallish but enthusiastic audience. The somber and adventurous program featured two British works, played with dark emotional intensity – The Exterminating Angel Symphony by Thomas Adès and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Not a fan of the opera on which the symphony is based, I find the symphonic score does a better job of condensing actions and clarifying narratives where in opera the words in a poorly written libretto often get in the way. The final devil’s waltz sounded truly terrifying under Mirga’s baton and the Birmingham orchestra’s menacing brass section. Birmingham’s lovely and eloquent strings were heard prominently in the Fantasia, where the Tallis theme undergoes various transfigurations (offstage, divided, or in a string quartet). Mirga adopted a brisker-than-usual tempo and that’s just fine given the current depressing state of affairs in the UK, politically and economically. I am sure these fine Birmingham musicians were happy to get away from home for a few weeks at least. And speaking of fine brass and string playing, in Debussy’s La Mer (technically a three-movement symphony in allegro-scherzo-allegro), Mirga achieved a fine balance between the brass and strings in the first two movements, and the brass and winds in the third (“Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea”). One could hear the oboe and flute duet clearly rising above the din of the brass and strings.
Saving the best to last, the Haydn C-Major Cello Concerto received a winning performance from Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who has proved equally adept at the emotionality of Elgar’s Concerto as well as the virtuoso bravura of Haydn’s Concerto – He will play both during the U.S. tour. Their final stop will be Carnegie Hall on October 22.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.