For its visit to this year’s Proms, the Ulster Orchestra and its chief conductor, Rafael Payare, brought a new work by the English-born, Belfast-based Piers Hellawell, who turns 60 this year. At 20 minutes long, Wild Flow consists of five pieces with faster outer sections framing a central slow movement.
Hellawell suggests that rather than developing organically, the result “offers a zigzag progression of mood and event”; he’s also distrustful of the notion of music being “about” something beyond its musical meaning. So if the piece itself registered as bitty – a sequence of diverse individual episodes without much sense of a larger picture – that was presumably deliberate, though there were certainly moments of striking character, colour and texture along the way, with sudden bursts of manic activity offset by moments of uneasy stasis – though rarely of calm. This premiere performance felt entirely assured.
The big work in the second half was Tchaikovsky’s popular Fifth Symphony. Though the quality of playing was high throughout, reminding listeners what a valuable cultural asset to Northern Ireland this orchestra is, the performance could have done with a stronger sense of the music’s immediate and long-term goals.
The concert’s highlights came in the shape of Armenian cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan’s technically impeccable and distinctively personal account of Haydn’s First Cello Concerto, and with his encore – Lamentatio by the contemporary Sicilian composer Giovanni Sollima – in which his singing along to his own playing was just one remarkable feature of an outstanding display of musicianship.
