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Aurora Orchestra / Dean review – irrepressible energy to beat winter blues

Aurora Orchestra / Dean review – irrepressible energy to beat winter blues. Wigmore Hall, LondonDespite some last-minute substitutions, this Britten concert – and premiere of Josephine Stephenson’s stetting of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer – was performed at full strength

December is a treacherous time of year for concert organisers, when winter ailments can wreak havoc with the best plans, and for the latest programme in the Wigmore Hall’s Britten series, with Brett Dean conducting the Aurora Orchestra, neither of the soloists was able to sing as originally intended. A week beforehand, soprano Sophie Bevan had withdrawn from the concert and been replaced by Ailish Tynan, and although the tenor Allan Clayton was able to give the premiere of a work specially composed for him, he did not feel he could sing Britten’s Serenade as planned. Robert Murray substituted for him at the last moment.

Both proved fine replacements. Even if Tynan sometimes seemed rather detached in the Rimbaud settings of Les Illuminations, her words a little cloudy, the surging muscularity that Dean obtained from the Aurora strings more than compensated for what was missing. In the Serenade, Murray was partnered by horn player Christopher Parkes; their performance was quick-witted and intelligently dramatised, but nudged to a perfect close in Murray’s gentle delivery of the final Keats sonnet and the solo horn epilogue.

Rimbaud had also featured in the new work for tenor and strings, Josephine Stephenson’s Une Saison en Enfer, which shapes five extracts from the prose poem of the same name. It is well tailored to Clayton’s shining sound, in music that sometimes recalls Lutosławski’s tenor settings of French texts in his 1965 song cycle Paroles Tissées, and sometimes harks back to early 20th-century French song. But coming straight after the irrepressible energy and imagination of Les Illuminations, it was almost guaranteed to seem a little earthbound.