Dora Pejacevic Overture
Grace Williams Violin Concerto (Geneva Lewis: violin)
Gustav Holst The Planets

On a damp London evening it was warming to see the Albert Hall as full as I have seen it for a very long time for this evening’s concert, barely a spare seat in the house and Promenaders packed in like Sardines – all very encouraging.

Dora Pejacevic’s Overture (1919), is a short work loosely in sonata form with hints of film music and the Croatian and Hungarian music of her background, particularly towards the end. It dances along too, with syncopated rhythms and a triumphal ¾ ending with forthright brass that in the careful hands of Jaime Martín isn’t allowed to dominate.

Grace Williams’ violin concerto is in unusual form, the three movements being slow-slow-fast. An eerie opening with the solo violin floating over muted strings and brass develops into a deeply lyrical movement punctuated with a fiery cadenza with tricky double stopping and an awkward passage of stopped fourths, all handled expertly by Geneva Lewis, a current BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. The second movement, with some unusual orchestral effects (pianissimo gong, just enough to sense the timbre, for example) segues into the punchier last movement with more humorous rising chromatic phrases intruding into the lyricism. At times the orchestra and soloist lost balance, drowning out some of the detail of the solo work which was unfortunate..

After the interval there was a definite sense of both orchestra and audience settling in for 50 pleasurable minutes with a well-known old friend, Holst’s stellar suite having been played over forty times at the Proms. And tonight’s performance would have been up there with the best of any, from the opening tension of the Mars rhythm to the final drift into the distance of the ladies’ voices at the end of Neptune the energy infected the whole hall.

Venus employed some particularly beautiful playing from the two harps and celeste, Mercury bubbled along playfully especially in the string semi-quaver passages whilst Jupiter had the audience almost sighing with appreciation at the very well-known second subject.

But it is the last three movements that, for me, make a Planets performance, and where Holst employs some unusual and challenging orchestration: Saturn with four flutes (one of them a bass) accompanying the double bass section (particularly fine dynamics this evening, the crescendo and decrescendo being acutely observed). Uranus with its angular, staccato 6/4 rhythms and particularly Neptune with its wordless celestial chorus of womens’ voices. Tonight they were positioned at the back of the very top gallery with their backs turned to the stage. Whilst the effect was magical the musicianship challenge was huge and it was a great shame that there were a couple of perhaps inevitable rhythmic glitches and speeding up.

The only criticism I might make was of the audience – perhaps it is my age and upbringing, but a collective decision to applaud after every movement (presumably because they’re played commonly as stand-alone pieces on certain radio stations) somehow diminishes the integrity of the suite as whole work. I sensed Jaime Martín felt it too, as he was very keen to move on swiftly after Saturn and segued Uranus and Neptune together, which I thought worked much better.

But overall, an excellent evening of pieces both new and familiar that left this reviewer smiling and humming all the way home.

Lucas Elkin