Preludio sinfonico - Puccini
Piano Concerto - Menotti
Lemminkainen Suite - Sibelius
The free BBC Invitation Concerts given by the Ulster Orchestra every summer concentrate on neglected and unfamiliar repertory. This year's series features two themes - the concertos of Barber and Menotti, and 19thcentury musical narratives of various kinds. The Piano Concerto by Gian Carlo Menotti dates from the mid-1940s. This is a brilliant, inventive work, but all the same one can't help feeling that Menotti's real problem is not that his music is too conservative, too accessible, too tuneful or whatever, but simply that some of his ideas are rather commonplace. The lush slow movement is worth rescuing from the repetitive allegros that surround it, but Philip Martin played it all with perfect fluency and fine shading.
Puccini's very early Preludio sinfonico from 1876 is another symphonic piece by a composer usually associated with opera. It's already entirely characteristic of him, and at the climax one can just imagine a tenor and a soprano singing the main theme in octaves.
Sibelius's stark, nordic symphonic cycle made quite a contrast. It contains one of Sibelius's best-known works, The Swan of Tuonela, which gains from being played in the context of the whole cycle. If the opening Lemminkainen And The Maidens Of The Island rather missed its mark, and the concluding Lemminkainen's Return lacked wild excitement, the Swedish conductor Niklas Willen drew broad, intense performances of the Swan and the gloomy but gripping Lemminkainen In Tuonela.
