On paper this programme looks like a curator hedging bets: Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra and Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending before the interval, then Adès's Märchentänze and Sibelius's Fifth after. The folk-music threads (through Tippett and Adès) and the nature imagery (VW's lark, Sibelius's swans) are tidy thematic ribbons, but Wigglesworth seems to have chosen something less obvious as the binding agent — the shared problem of making something new without severing the umbilical cord to the old. The Lark Ascending is the evening's most dangerous test of that thesis. Soloist Anthony Marwood refused the Smooth Classics at Seven reading entirely: covered, icy string tone from the BSO, a cool no-vibrato opening, an improvisatory looseness that made the familiar feel genuinely risky. The gamble didn't fully pay off — intonation problems blotted the performance — but the ambition was the right kind of wrong. His Stradivarius had an expensive sweetness underneath the austerity, and when it worked the effect was unsettling in the best sense. Marwood recovered more convincingly in the Adès Märchentänze, a piece that tangles folk tunes into unexpected timbral combinations with an almost mischievous pleasure. His solo line deliciously knotted itself around the orchestra's violins. The caveat is that this work was written for Pekka Kuusisto, whose charisma is almost a structural requirement of the piece, and without that particular wattage the music ran cool. That's not Marwood's failure so much as the piece's dependency — it's a co-composition in effect. Sibelius's Fifth had personality to burn. Wigglesworth front-loaded the symphony's modernist strangeness rather than smoothing toward the familiar: shadowy wind solos, creepy string tremolos, double basses lurching nastily instead of easing into the finale's swan music. Some of this is the room's problem — the trombones were almost comically direct — and the wind section had tuning difficulties. But Wigglesworth's most distinctive quality as a conductor is his management of transitional passages, and here he earned it fully: easing weight out of dense textures, cresting toward the climax with the slow inevitability of a wave that has been building for a very long time. The Tippett, though, was the night's justification. The pacing was unhurried, even laid-back, but Wigglesworth imposed an angular neatness on Tippett's neoclassical lines — phrasing with hospital corners, the review aptly puts it — and the BSO's strings showed genuine range: a frosted, striking tone in the first movement dissolving into the generous warmth that spread euphorically through the finale. This is the kind of Tippett performance that makes you wonder why the piece isn't programmed more often. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at a future date.
