BBCSSO / Wigglesworth / Osborne review – jazz energy meets its match in French insouciance
Ryan Wigglesworth’s piano concerto, veering between tense, creepy and off-kilter, brought out the best in soloist Steven Osborne
A dance can be a frenzied release or a whimsical invitation, sophisticated or primal, gilded and ballroom-ready or slouching, whisky on its breath. In this Aldeburgh festival concert from Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, it was all these things and a couple more for good measure.
Resident throughout the festival’s opening weekend, the BBCSSO had brought reinforcements from home for this final concert in the form of Scottish pianist Steven Osborne – soloist in both Ravel’s Piano Concerto and, after the interval, Wigglesworth’s own.
But if the programme read like a bravura epic, Osborne was at pains to dispel that impression. His Ravel has always been an exercise in elegant understatement, and here he played the straight man to the orchestra’s band of reprobates – brass and woodwind forever trying to lure him into the jazz club. Osborne left the dirty work to them, suspicious of any melodic indulgence in the first movement, the piano’s long adagio melody limpidly clear, cross-rhythms peremptorily crisp in the presto. America’s jazz energy meeting its match in French insouciance.
The Wigglesworth demanded something different – Osborne now the sane man adrift in the orchestra’s musical asylum, lively with musical echoes and allusions. After an atmospheric opening arioso, nervous little woodwind figures setting up tension that never released, and a violent scherzo, the piano finally got its own back in a deliciously creepy notturno. Osborne loaded an ingenuous, childlike theme with a horror film’s disquiet, before pressing his advantage in the finale – an off-kilter gigue, whose closing solo could suggest a victory for sanity, but in Osborne’s layered performance was full of questions.
US composer Elizabeth Ogonek’s 2017 All These Lighted Things opened the evening in playful, low-stakes mood – dances thwarted as much as embraced – and how better to close the programme than by whirling off the edge of a crumbling world with Ravel’s La Valse? Conducting without a score, Wigglesworth swept his orchestra into the composer’s disintegrating dancefloor, daring brass and double basses to swallow it whole with their elemental force while egging the violins on in their quest for silken nostalgia – a thrilling tumble into the musical abyss.
• Aldeburgh festival continues until 28 June