‘I’m just happy to be making music in the first place,” Ryan Bancroft told the BBC’s Nicola Heywood Thomas during a pause in his Prom with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Bancroft’s first concert as the BBCNOW’s principal conductor (his appointment was announced last year) was also the orchestra’s first since lockdown, and the first Prom to be streamed from Cardiff. You couldn’t help but sense the musicians’ relief at being back on the Hoddinott Hall platform.
An energetic yet graceful conductor, Bancroft, who was born in California, opted for a programme of mostly American music for small forces, though he opened with Martinů’s eclectic Jazz Suite. The concert’s centrepiece was the world premiere of Rough Voices by Gavin Higgins, the BBCNOW’s new composer in association. The Martinů, heavily indebted to Stravinsky, Ravel and Milhaud, sounded svelte and suitably chic. Rough Voices, commissioned as a response to Covid-19, is grieving, fierce and dissonant, a howl of protest at how the pandemic has disproportionately affected the poorest in society – “a rallying call for the underclasses” as Higgins describes it.
The two pieces were separated by John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, done with bags of panache and punchy dexterity. The concert’s emotional high point, however, came at the end, with two mid-20th-century American classics, Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and the suite from Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Bancroft used the original chamber version, sparse, lean and wonderfully transparent, for his unsentimental interpretation of the latter. It’s almost impossible, meanwhile, not to be affected by Barber’s evocation of a happy, but lost childhood, written shortly after the death of his father. Natalya Romaniw was the dark-toned soprano soloist in a performance of astonishing poignancy that was beautifully conducted and played.
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