If we could keep living our life over and over again, would we get better at it? This is the premise underpinning Life After Life, the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel.
The baton passed, metaphorically, to the Hallé last night in the Vaughan Williams symphony cycle shared between them and the BBC Philharmonic to mark the composer’s 150th anniversary. Literally, that baton was in the same hand as on the last date, for it was John Wilson who conducted the Ninth Symphony, as he had the second and seventh 12 days ago. This time VW was paired with Holst, as the second part of the concert consisted of The Planets.
"Disgusting", "depressing", "sheer horror from start to finish", a "filthy, rotten, immoral play". Such were the comments from viewers published across a spectrum of British newspapers following the BBC transmission, on 12 December 1954, of Nigel Kneale’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
At first sight, Vaughan Williams’ Second and Seventh Symphonies might seem to have a lot in common. Both are quite programmatic and pictorial, the second (the London) including music that might have finished up as a tone poem, and the seventh (Sinfonia antartica) adapted from his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948).
Continuing the joint BBC Philharmonic/Hallé celebration of Vaughan Williams, Sir Andrew Davis took on the job of presenting three substantial works on Saturday.
There is little denying that the Antarctic continent is no longer possessed of the allure that it once was. By all accounts, particularly those unspoken, Antarctica has been betrayed, usurped, eclipsed.
Beyond the sober walls of research laboratories, or the heady enthusiasm of university corridors, people today have scant interest in the icy land mass, twice the size of Australia, on average the coldest, driest, windiest of continents, home to penguins, seals and tardigrades, that 2016 Animal of the Year, though it may be.
There was no overt reference to the world outside in this concert, and yet the poignancy of its content could hardly have been clearer if it had been planned: two symphonies and a song cycle each touched by the tragedy of war.
It might seem odd to start with the encore, but I’ve never seen one like it. At the end of its two-night residency at the Festival Hall, having just romped through the rigours of The Rite of Spring, the players of the Budapest Festival Orchestra put their instruments down, shuffled to their feet and sang for us.
A man sits at a table in an otherwise bare room. Shot in monochrome and positioned off-centre, he reads a newspaper and smokes a cigar, lazily obscured as two other figures drift into and out of shot. A brief fight ensues. A man falls to the floor and is dragged away. Suddenly, a door opens. A new man stands at the foot of a staircase. It leads to another room, where yet more men await.
This remarkable evening should really have been more remarkable still. The unfortunate pianist Cédric Tiberghien took an official pre-travel Covid test that obliged him to drop out at 5pm – even though, as he tweeted in frustration, three subsequent lateral flow tests came out negative. Such is concert life in the Covid era. Nobody could be expected to find a replacement to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at two hours’ notice, so the work was dropped.