BBCSO/Oramo performs UK premiere of Turnage's 'Festen' Suite

The BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBCSO) and Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo performed the UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's new "Festen Suite" at London's Royal Albert Hall. The suite is drawn from Turnage's opera, based on Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film "Festen" ("The Celebration"), which exposes a secret of incest and child abuse during a patriarch's 60th birthday party.

The eight-movement suite vividly evokes the atmosphere: the stale wine and cigar smoke from the composer's brilliantly orchestrated prelude, whose forced jollity is beaten into shape by percussion. It ricochets between lyricism – the gentle melancholy of "Blue or Green" and pastoral tenderness in "Grandma's Song" – and denial, slinky in "Conga" with its rictus grin, sleazy in "Interlude I". Revelations break through in "The Fight", where string textures are stripped away to let brass and woodwind land clean punches. The suite is cleverly made and musically satisfying on its own terms, without the opera's dramatic scaffolding.

Oramo conducted Sibelius's Second Symphony with clarity and momentum, keeping the finale in sight from the start. He let the brass loose for a grandiose yet joyful finish. This provided catharsis after Britten's inscrutable Cello Symphony, where soloist Guy Johnston remained scrupulously faithful to the composer's conception, acting as the orchestra's equal, often part of the texture rather than its focus. In the Royal Albert Hall, this delicate balance risked being lost in the moment, though radio listeners likely captured the subtleties.