Until the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra announces the appointment of its next chief conductor, all concerts at Symphony Hall will seem a bit like auditions; the lineup of guests there between now and next summer includes a number of likely candidates. Whether Ryan Wigglesworth is one of them, though, is hard to judge: he is very much a composer as well as a conductor, so taking responsibility for a leading orchestra might leave him with less time for his own music.
To judge from this concert, though, Wigglesworth is already very popular with the CBSO and its regular audience. His performance of Elgar’s First Symphony was warmly received, and the orchestra, with all its section principals on duty, played exceptionally well for him. There’s a bold directness about the sound he produces, and the detail he extracts from scores in a faithful acoustic such as Symphony Hall’s. Even if he sometimes fussed, exaggerating ritardandos or adding minute dynamic changes, the thrust of each movement was clear and purposeful, and the return of the main motto theme in the finale’s closing bars as conclusive as it ought to be.
That ear for detail had been obvious, too, in Our Hunting Fathers, Britten’s astonishingly precocious “symphonic cycle” of 1936, one of his greatest early achievements. Every instrumental strand was tinglingly vivid. Mark Padmore was the immaculate soloist, though occasionally a bit too restrained; there’s more savage irony in the setting of some of the texts than he allowed, though the path he managed to steer though the verbal thickets of Auden’s prologue and epilogue was admirably lucid.
Wigglesworth had begun with one of his own pieces, Etudes-Tableaux, which was premiered in Cleveland at the beginning of this year and brought to the UK by the BBC Symphony Orchestra shortly afterwards. Then it seemed rather abruptly truncated; here the impression was of an expertly polished but sometimes congested piece, which packed enough ideas for something much more substantial into less than 15 minutes.
