Royal Albert corridor,London
Steven Isserlis brought subtlety to a original version of Thomas Adès’s cello concerto, while his pupil Francisco Coll made a witty Proms debutTwo recent string concertos featured in the Britten Sinfonia’s Prom under Thomas Adès, and one of them by the conductor himself. Originally written in 2009 as a piece for cello and piano,Lieux Retrouvés (Places Revisited) was heard in a original version for cello and small orchestra that was receiving its UK premiere with Steven Isserlis, the adept soloist.
As well as being a concerto, or the result might equally be construed as a suite of character pieces,its movement titles Waters, The Mountain, and The Field and The Town – subtitled Cancan Macabre – suggesting the types of locale evoked along the way,a gentle fluidity marking out the aquatic territory of the first, the cello rising towards a distantly glimpsed peak in the second, and so on. Within the urban ruckus of the fourth,Offenbach’s illustrious cancan achieved a comic-grotesque and at times ghostly apotheosis.
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Source: theguardian.com