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Philharmonia Orchestra/Wilson, review: Moving mix of Wilson and Williams

Elegaic: John Wilson offered a wonderfully eloquent evening
Elegaic: John Wilson offered a wonderfully eloquent evening

Known primarily for his exuberant showtime concerts at the BBC Proms, John Wilson is also an enthusiastic advocate of British music and especially the symphonies of Vaughan Williams. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the performance of Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture that opened his concert with the Philharmonia got into its stride in the brassy, breezy passages.

In Julian Anderson’s Prayer for solo viola, Lawrence Power did well to integrate the predominantly contemplative elements with the curiously abrasive ones that intervene, especially as the pianissimo opening and ending were wrecked by amplified noise from elsewhere in the building.

The piece was delivered as a kind of extended upbeat, without a break, to Walton’s Viola Concerto, one of the finest works for the instrument written in the 20th century (not that the competition is too stiff) with Power wonderfully eloquent here too.

There were times when Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony, delivered by a Philharmonia Orchestra fielding no fewer than a dozen guest principals, smacked too much of a routine Sunday afternoon affair.

The composer unpromisingly likened his slow movement to “Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon”, but Wilson’s searching account pointed up the deeper elegiac resonances of a work premiered just a few months before the outbreak of World War I.