Lennox Berkeley
Serenade for Strings, Op. 12
Bridge
Lament, H. 117
Britten
Les illuminations, Op. 18
Imogen Holst
Suite for String Orchestra
Britten
Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10
Julie Roset (soprano)
Sinfonia of London Strings
John Wilson
Reviewed by: David Gutman
Reviewed: 6 September, 2026
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
Earlier this season, John Wilson confirmed his orchestra’s special status with an extravagant realisation of Respighi’s Roman trilogy. Here, in the last of the year’s Sunday morning entertainments, a much-reduced ensemble trading under the same banner shone brightly and raised a few doubts.
I was not present when, in 1967, Lennox Berkeley himself introduced the Serenade (some thirty years late) to the Proms, but it is difficult to imagine the BBC Symphony Orchestra of that era producing the refined and focused sonority of these players. Wilson’s typically insistent, forensic manner did not preclude the expression of a deeper intensity in the Serenade’s finale, any more than it did in Bridge’s Lament. The pianissimos dipped below the air cooling.
Britten’s Les illuminations has always worked best with a soprano, and there have been some wonderful exponents in my lifetime, from Heather Harper to Anu Komsi and Barbara Hannigan. Julie Roset, initially best known in early music circles and now an in-demand coloratura, has a brighter, more nimble sound, perhaps closer to that of Sophie Wyss for whom the music was written. She infused proceedings with a wonderfully natural radiance and dazzle, no doubt helped by her wholly idiomatic French. Her intonation was faultless, with Wilson’s band simply stellar in support.
Things went downhill after the interval. Not that it was the fault of Wilson and his expert players that Imogen Holst’s Suite for String Orchestra proved dispiriting listening, never quite achieving lift-off. Its invention, at times understandably reminiscent of Gustav’s, is curiously cramped. Finally, more Britten in a rendition that will certainly have divided opinion. In the Frank Bridge Variations Wilson’s extremist tendencies were on pretty much permanent display. There was no denying the brilliance of the execution but the conductor’s almost militaristic rigidity will have bothered some listeners. One began to long for blander music-making that takes fast music a little too slowly and slow music a little too fast. Britten’s ‘Alla italiana’ was frenzied; it might have worked perfectly well had not other variations been similarly overdriven. At the other end of the spectrum, the ‘Funeral March’ was not short-changed but seemed to breathe the air of a different composition.