Thrilling Bax and radiant Vaughan Williams from rising star Enyi Okpara and the BSO in Poole – Seen and Heard International Review
Bax –Tntagel
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.1
Vaughan Williams – Symphony No.5
Enyi Okpara is the Calleva Assistant Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; he has been appointed Fellow Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the 2026/27 season. He is the Artistic Director and Founder of Elysium Music, a charity dedicated to collaborative projects between young professional musicians and children; and he is one of Classic FM’s Rising Stars for 2025. He is also a very engaging young man, passionate about what he does: it was very evident at this concert that he has forged an excellent relationship with the orchestral players in front of him. His conducting style is fluid and expressive, using his whole body and the full extent of his arms; there is no flamboyance for its own sake, and his beat is clear when it needs to be.
It was a treat to hear Bax’s evocative tone poem Tintagel, part seascape and part love-song (Andrew Burn’s programme note told the story of the composer’s affair with Harriet Cohen). We felt the surge of the sea from the opening bars: what followed was a spacious and dramatic performance, with nothing held back. The horns and brass were on magnificent form, the strings leaving us in no doubt of the tide of passion, both elemental and erotic, that drives the piece. It was an exhilarating performance.
What a marvellous work Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto is! It seems to leave behind the Mozartian manners of the Second (which, of course, was written first), announcing instead the young composer’s already Promethean boldness, brio and sense of fun. I had not previously heard the pianist Martin James Bartlett – winner in 2014 of the BBC Young Musician of the Year, still young but well into an international performing career – but I was very pleased to do so: he is a pianist of real personality as well as jaw-dropping virtuosity. He quite rightly played up the music’s playful nature, his hands in the first movement chasing each other up and down the keyboard, Okpara securing light-footed, sweet-toned accompaniment from the orchestral strings.
I felt just a hint of preciousness in Bartlett’s opening statement of the Largo, but he was persuasive enough in this extended movement (the longest slow movement in any of Beethoven’s concertos), Okpara using his hands and arms to match him with eloquent and expressive orchestral sound. Yet there was a sense of mild relief when the sparkling Rondo crashed in – an unduly violent verb, you may think, but Bartlett’s interpretation of Beethoven’s game here was to play it as fast as he possibly could. It was certainly exciting, and his articulation of the notes at high speed was impressive: but there is a mischievous smile in this music which is perhaps clearer when it is less torrentially played. The performance was rapturously received (the Poole audience always appreciates a fine soloist), and Bartlett’s encore – Robert Schumann’s Von fremden Ländern und Menschen, the magical opening of his Kinderszenen – opened a window on a very different musical world: it left me hoping to hear him play more Schumann rather than Beethoven.
It is difficult to express the quality of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony in words. How to explain the effect of the opening, the horns in D seeming to float above the deep C in the lower strings? The symphony’s kinship with his opera The Pilgrim’s Progress is a help; and its position between the negative forces of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies seems to strengthen its integrity rather than compromise it. Its quietness and the subtlety of its shifts of harmony and dynamics must make it hard to conduct; there’s nowhere to hide. Enyi Okpara and the orchestra navigated its challenges and found its essence, its visionary gleam, magnificently.
The Bournemouth strings were superb in the first movement’s gentle surge and swell, and its scurrying half-lights, on the way to a tremendous climax against the nay-saying dissonances of the winds; the Scherzo was fleet, characterful, cat-footed, with snarling trombones; the Romanza at the work’s heart was wonderful, its exquisite opening cor anglais melody later taken up by a solo horn, lovely sounds from the other woodwinds, gentle alleluias shining through the texture. The Passacaglia was a fitting conclusion, from its sublime walking tune through its changes of pace and its (brilliantly handled) brass climax to its prolonged dying down to stillness over a soft drum-roll.
The orchestra made its approbation of and affection for Okpara very clear; so did the audience. He enjoyed his moment, and he had earned it. I shall follow his developing career with interest.
Chris Kettle
