LPO/Andrew Manze – Vaughan Williams and Tom Coult’s Pleasure Garden, with Daniel Pioro

Vaughan Williams
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Tom Coult
Pleasure Garden: concerto for violin & orchestra [London premiere]
Vaughan Williams
The Lark Ascending 
Symphony No.9 in E-minor

Daniel Pioro (violin)

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Andrew Manze

The 34-year-old Tom Coult’s star is, like Vaughan Williams’s lark, steadily ascending – a Proms commission to launch the 2017 season, the Aldeburgh Festival’s premiere staging of his first opera Violet this year, and the London premiere of Pleasure Garden. It was first heard in November 2021, from the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, a Radio 3 and Salford University commission to mark the opening of Bridgewater’s new RHS garden, both with Daniel Pioro as soloist.

There is new music that explains itself in the hearing, and new music that needs a programme-note guide, usually by the composer, to prep the listener. Without the latter, I do wonder how much of the imagery in each of the eccentrically titled four movements – to do with raindrops and Zen gardens in ancient Japan, birds silenced by the heavenly playing of an organist in a garden in medieval Florence, the arrival of Queen Victoria to Salford by boat on a canal dyed blue for the occasion – would have registered in Coult’s music, let alone be transformed. The most successful bit was the final movement, ‘The art of setting stones’, where granite-like orchestral statements erupted out of a pale background to suggest the elemental wonder lurking behind the extreme stylisation of a Zen rock garden. Elsewhere, the clacking of woodblocks to suggest a gathering rainstorm veered close to onomatopoeia, while the sudden escalation of birdsong in the third movement had a Hitchcock-style threat Coult might not have intended. His orchestral skill is impressively finessed, with a canny use of piano, and he’s very sparing with the percussion. It had crossed my mind that Pleasure Garden might lurch into an urban-versus-nature eco-drama, but Coult’s quizzical, fanciful imagination was firmly in charge. The formidably complete musician Daniel Pioro gave the violin’s role a powerful eloquence, but there were times when the work rather undersold the soloist, an observer, like Harold in Italy, rather than a full-on presence. You got a better idea of Pioro’s generous tone and lyricism in The Lark Ascending, with a breathtaking vanishing act at the close, when the lark is assumed into silence.

Andrew Manze and the LPO had delivered the intricacies of Coult’s music with a keen ear for its colourful impressionism. And it was in marked contrast to Vaughan Williams’s dominance, and the Coult struggled a bit after the deeply felt performance of the Tallis Fantasia in which the layers of string ensembles rose and sank in an effortless liminal serenity. Before the final work, Manze made his case for the Symphony No.9 as Vaughan Williams’s masterpiece and then went on to prove his point. What an extraordinary piece it is. The composer was in his mid-eighties and not about to go gentle into that good night. Manze and the LPO conveyed unsparingly its darkness and ferocity, VW’s tribute to Thomas Hardy’s Tess couched in musical terms I’m sure Shostakovich would have appreciated. I doubt if Manze’s account could have been more persuasive, a story transcended during the telling.