No white smoke has been spotted rising above Symphony Hall yet, but it seems that the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is now getting closer to the appointment of a new music director, filling the vacancy left by the departure of Andris Nelsons last summer. A number of concerts this season have been seen as public auditions for the post, and one of the candidates who seems to be near the top of many people’s shortlists conducted this Sunday afternoon programme.
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is a 29-year-old Lithuanian, who is currently assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She conducted the CBSO for the first time last July, and made such an impression with the orchestra and the audience that she was invited back for this specially arranged concert.
It was easy to understand why she has gone down so well in Birmingham. Her platform style is certainly distinctive: Gražinytė-Tyla began with Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune, applying the dabs of orchestral colour with sharp stabs of her baton, and sculpting the larger shapes of the music with sweeping gestures. But for once such balletic poses really did communicate something wonderfully alive and detailed to the players, a performance with fresh, clear textures and an unswerving sense of shape.
In Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite, too, there was that same attention to every morsel of detail, and the same knack of moulding each of the four movements into a convincing dramatic shape, even in the opening Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari, which can seem rather unruly. The last movement was built to a terrific climax, too, after she had favoured the alternative ordering for the middle two movements, with the Swan of Tuonela third in the sequence, though that hardly helps the narrative that underpins Sibelius’s scheme.
The concert’s only disappointment came in Schumann’s Piano Concerto, where the soloist Beatrice Rana, tipped for great things since coming second in the 2013 Van Cliburn competition, didn’t quite live up to the hype. Her performance went in fits and starts – a mix of reticence and odd tempo changes in the first movement, a rather dull intermezzo and a blustering finale. Rana’s encore, Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s song Widmung, was altogether more convincing.
