From whispered strings to bone-shaking organ, RLPO’s season opener turned sound into spectacle. This was a night of courage, surprise and orchestral force.
George Butterworth A Shropshire Lad
Mark Simpson Hold Your Heart in Your Teeth
Graham Fitkin Metal
Mussorgsky (arr. Wood) Pictures at an Exhibition
Review
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra opened its 2025/2026 season with a sparkling evening of richly orchestrated music that heightens the senses, kicking off the much-anticipated new artist residency of Liverpudlian composer Mark Simpson with an entertaining new viola concerto written for viola player Timothy Ridout.
A near capacity audience at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall is greeted by the reliably self-effacing Andrew Manze at the podium, welcoming all to the new season, promising excitement, and emphasising something not only worthwhile but fulfilling too. Shiny big bells are pointed to at the back of the stage in readiness for the programme. The audience respond warmly in the brightly lit airy interior. This kind of energy, a measure of the connection between audience and stage, works wonders before a single note sounds.
Butterworth’s Shropshire Lad settles us, opening with imperceptible strings that still the air and focus the mind. An orchestral rhapsody drawn from A.E. Housman’s poems, it carries the temptation to hear the music through the lens of Butterworth’s own fate in the Great War, his life cut short at just 31. Better, perhaps, to listen having parked that association. The pastoral character Butterworth summons in his complex harmonic progressions never veers into the twee or saccharine. Soft textures underpin a broad harmonic range, allowing all manner of twists and turns that push us farther than might have been anticipated. We witness concisely sketched scenes. We are taken to unusual places to confront unfamiliar and uncomfortable feelings. Nothing is too far or too fast, but when we arrive at its gentle yet resolute conclusion there is an overriding sense that something — or someone — has left us. This gently sombre concert opener has the effect of making us pause and remember.
Like peers such as Dani Howard, Daniel Kidane, Helen Grime, Huw Watkins and Gavin Higgins, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s artist in residence Mark Simpson succeeds in creating work that attracts anticipation amongst curious devotees. The implicit connection established between audience, composer, and artist when a new work is billed means we end up bearing witness to their own artistic path. It is the equivalent of sticking with a box set year after year. The expectation is great and so too, if you’re a composer reading this, the pressure. Here Simpson channels that weight into music inspired by the Romanian saying “hold your heart in your teeth” — a rallying cry that feels, in the hall, like an anthem for confidence building.
Simpson doesn’t disappoint in this new concerto. Bold theatrics are extracted from this versatile and tenacious orchestra in a score that speaks immediately. Simpson’s love of orchestration is evident: it’s this that makes us feel as we know him, even though we don’t really. The orchestra is transformed into a gargantuan cave — a space created by the inventive sounds they’re called upon to create. At the centre, Timothy Ridout occupies his space, soloist pitched against orchestra in a battle of virtuosic display and lyrical introspection. He creates a big sound. There is no let up for him in the score. He must surely be exhausted. A glimpse of him talking to audience members before everyone goes home indicates that if he was, he’s still running on adrenaline.
In the second half, Graham Fitkin’s Metal is a thoughtful addition to the programme, providing a shot in the arm post-interval. After Simpson’s concerto, Fitkin’s repeated rock syncopations are momentarily in danger of feeling a little staid. Instead we’re wowed by brilliance in the sound and the inevitable sheen in the textures. Metal feels like a close cousin to John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine — exhilarating but with its own bite.
Given the forces necessary for Simpson’s concerto, it was perhaps unsurprising that a similar sized orchestration would be drawn upon later in the concert. Henry Wood’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, completed before the arrangement by Maurice Ravel which would later secure the orchestral version of the work amongst audiences, may not be the one that everyone knows and loves, but it is a fascinating study nonetheless. Hearing some of the comparatively unfamiliar settings of the musical vignettes (now familiar to us because of Ravel’s version) is mildly unsettling on the ear, in a similar way to seeing someone with just the wrong shade of hair dye and not being able to work out quite what isn’t working right.
There are moments where Wood’s dense scoring can feel overstuffed, as though the sheer size of the band was the priority for some of his orchestration choices. Despite some borderline comedy settings — The Gnome had a Disney-esque feel — from Limoges onwards the effect is electrifying. The judicious addition of organ in Catacombs provided an ominous pulsating presence that sent a chill down the spine. And frankly, come the blistering fortissimos in the Great Gate of Kiev, who doesn’t like hearing something so loud that it opens up even the pores of your skin and blasts out the detritus once in a while?
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