Conductor: Antoine Veillerette
360˚: Orbiting the Light, created by Sinfonia Smith Square’s ConcertLab, is another of their gloriously imaginative feasts. We enter to the sound of birdsong. The light is soft, the splendid pillars of the hall lit from time to time in pastel colours. These sound- and lightscapes continue as the concert takes shape. The programme is designed to create a summer nighttime from dusk to early dawn, with an alluring mixture of music and poetry, perfect for this spring equinox.
A wind quintet performs Samuel Barber’s Summer Music Op. 31, music that is by turns wistful and playful, evoking the liminal space of a park as dusk descends. This is followed by Joaquin Turina’s ‘Crepuscular’ from Scene Andalouse, an evocative blend of Spanish folk melodies and the sophisticated sounds of twentieth-century France.
Each section of the programme is introduced by a specially commissioned poem, written and read by poet Charlie Lee-Potter. So attentive are the poems to patterns of sound and rhythm that each feels like a short musical composition in itself. We might fleetingly catch the distinctive playfulness of a villanelle, then a rondeau. Each is shaped to evoke a particular time of night.
A hushed atmosphere is maintained throughout. Musicians silently form into groups, now a quintet, now an octet, sometimes playing in front of us, sometimes behind us. Occasionally music descends from the gallery. Mozart’s Allegro from Serenade in C Minor is introduced by the sound of a ticking clock, the music itself becoming the scene of a night of dancing. Grace Evangeline Mason’s lovely Midnight Spires has an Arvo Pårt-like solemnity.
A figure appears with a lantern before the performance of Matthew Hindson’s A Single Match, a piece about the battle of dark and light. Camille Pepin’s Avant les clartes de l’aurore, with its wailing trumpets and insistent percussion, suggests a more worldly dawn that is about to break, the dawn of a city. When that dawn comes, it is celebrated by Finnish composer Aulis Sallin’s Sunrise serenade, a pair of trumpets playing a call and response across the hall before the extended ensemble joins in. Only now do we see talented young conductor Antoine Veillerette, who has been silently operating in the shadows throughout the concert. A magical night.
Reviewed on 20 March 2025
