The BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition returns to our screens this weekend for its much-delayed 2020 finale. Banished to BBC Four, it’s looking increasingly like special-interest viewing rather than the mainstream event it once was. So what? If you’re looking for a real answer, then this concert from the London Symphony Orchestra is it: a showcase of what happens when you get children into classical music, and what happens when they grow up.
Two competition alumni – both still in their early 30s – are front and centre here. Grammy-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti has become a household name since her teenage win. Mark Simpson may be less familiar, a prodigious talent who remains the only musician to walk away with both BBC Young Musician and Young Composer awards.
It’s as a composer that Simpson is best-known now, thanks to works like his oratorio The Immortal (which won a South Bank Award), and the opera Pleasure, set in a Liverpool nightclub. The big draw here is the world premiere of his lockdown project: a new Violin Concerto for Benedetti.
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In a pre-performance conversation she describes it as “epic”. It’s no overstatement. The piece is 40 minutes of adrenaline – a mixture of that charged lyricism we saw in Simpson’s Cello Concerto, big rhythmic grooves and the kind of fidgety, furious virtuosity that could give a soloist sleepless nights.
The harmonic language is conventional enough, but Simpson manages to combine the elements into shapes that feel new. There’s a pervasive melancholy; modal scales nod to middle-Europe and beyond, poured out in song-like lines and yelping slides that bring the best out of Benedetti – a storyteller whose opening lament comes wrapped in little shivers of gong, bluesy muted trumpets and whispering strings.
These elements are remixed as the work progresses. Percussion sounds dry up and become the hollow knock of the tam-tam, setting the pulse for two big dance-driven movements. The closing Tarantella is almost Broadway in its gloss (the LSO brass sound a million dollars), syncopated beats hit harder and faster until we burn out in a final blaze.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Benedetti play better. Huskily urgent, coaxing in the slow movement’s melody, elsewhere she’s all sinew and intent and ferocity, guiding us through Simpson’s densest passages with the intelligence of her phrasing. It’s electrifying viewing – both a performance and a concerto that are here to stay.
And how clever to pair it with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 – that great wrestle between life-force and inevitable death.
Gianandrea Noseda’s Pathetique has less tension than some, releasing where others twist the knife, but the connection is obvious. Tchaikovsky’s battle ends in surrender, Simpson’s in explosive refusal: it’s a stand-off that makes for a knock-out concert.
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