The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has begun 2016 as it means to go on, marking the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare in as many concerts as it can. Edward Gardner’s programme was inspired by Warwickshire’s most celebrated son, and its focal point was the music William Walton composed for Laurence Olivier’s 1943 film of Henry V.
This was not, though, the well-known concert suite that Walton extracted from his score, but the more elaborate and substantial Henry V: A Shakespeare Scenario, that composer and arranger Christopher Palmer created from it after Walton’s death. It’s an hour-long interweaving of music with gobbets from the play – Palmer calculated that he had managed to include 90% of the film score, as well as finding space for a march that Walton composed for another never-realised Olivier project.
It’s a deft patchwork, but not, I think, a very successful one. There are no great discoveries among the less familiar music that Palmer included: the Agincourt section goes on longer than usual, the interludes include some decorative pastiches and borrowings from French folk songs.And without the cinematic images, the melding of speech and music seems contrived. Under Gardner, the orchestra and its chorus made it a vivid enough experience, though, and there was a nicely judged virtuoso performance from Samuel West as the narrator, who took on a variety of roles, from the Chorus to the king, via Falstaff, Pistol and the Duke of Burgundy.
The concert had begun with another rarely heard work, Macbeth – one of the least known of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems. It’s a dark, turbulent piece, without too many memorable moments, though Gardner made its fierce climax impressive enough. There was more Macbeth-inspired music in the shape of a taut, rhythmically snappy account of the ballet from Verdi’s opera, while in between came Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs, insubstantial, but a chance for the CBSO Chorus to shine without the orchestra getting in the way.
