The City of Birmingham Symphony’s spring season includes three significant UK premieres. Works by Hans Abrahamsen and John Luther Adams are due in the next two months. The first of the novelties was Osvaldo Golijov’s Azul, a cello concerto in all but name.
It’s not, by any means, a brand-new work: Yo-Yo Ma gave the first performance of Azul with the Boston Symphony Orchestra a decade ago, and Golijov has revised it a couple of times since. The composer’s intention was to “evoke the majesty of certain baroque adagios”, especially those by Couperin, whose Leçons de Ténèbres are an important part of the score’s genealogy.
The form is a 25-minute single span, divided into two distinct parts, featuring a series of long cello cantilenas over densely massed orchestral textures. They are separated by more energetic interludes in which what Golijov calls a “21st-century continuo group” of accordion, exotic percussion and sampling keyboard comes to the fore. The mix of old and new, of classical and world music, is a familiar Golijov amalgam. The result, to my ears, is rather unattractively sentimental. At times, Azul’s combination of yearning cello and throbbing orchestra recalls John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, but Tavener’s work seems a model of clarity and restraint by comparison.
The performance, though, was a fine one. The cello soloist was the CBSO’s principal Eduardo Vassallo, and the orchestra’s assistant conductor Alpesh Chauhan, who began his musical career in the CBSO Youth Orchestra, took charge. Russian music provided the frame: Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, from the opera Prince Igor, and Shostakovich’s final, death-haunted symphony, the 15th, in which Chauhan caught the edge of sardonic humour and bleakness perfectly – even if he made the finale’s puttering close a bit more prosaic than it ought to be.
