Horn maestro rounds off a top-notch night of music by Sydney Symphony

Two works by Benjamin Britten and some searing Shostakovich seals a cracking Sydney Symphony concert.

Stefan Dohr and Andrew Goodwin appearing with Andrew Haveron and Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Picture: Craig Abercrombie

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The year after he returned to wartime Britain having lived in America from 1939 to 1942 as a conscientious objector, English composer Benjamin Britten wrote two works – one dedicated to an orchestra’s 10th anniversary and the other for his lifetime partner, the tenor Peter Pears.

These works, Prelude and Fugue for 18 Strings and Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, were featured in a superb one-hour concert directed by Sydney Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Andrew Haveron, starring Berlin Philharmonic’s principal horn Stefan Dohr and one of Australia’s finest young tenors, Andrew Goodwin.

Haveron and his small crew rounded off the program with a performance of a Chamber Symphony by Britten’s great friend, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich – one of three that conductor Rudolf Barshai arranged based on string quartets.

Haveron’s 1757 Guadagnini violin soared above the mournful unison strings in Britten’s prelude before each orchestra member got a crack of the whip in the energetic and irrepressible fugue section. Britten dedicated the piece to English conductor Boyd Neel’s orchestra, somewhat diminished in size as several musicians were still serving in the armed forces, which had premiered some of his earlier works.

His Serenade comprises six nocturne settings of verses by five English poets – Alfred Tennyson, John Keats, William Blake, Ben Jonson and Charles Cotton – and a quite chilling setting of the traditional Lyke Wake Dirge. Goodwin’s sweet light tenor was beautifully complemented by Dohr’s burnished and multi-layered tone, both negotiating the virtuosic passages including leaping bugle calls until the final poem, a sonnet by Keats. Here Goodwin inhabited the lines “O soft embalmer of the still midnight!” before everything faded to a haunting horn solo played off stage.

What a performance!

Shostakovich’s 10th quartet has been accurately described as both his harshest and friendliest and it lends itself brilliantly to the larger forces of a string orchestra. This is music that is very much in Haveron’s DNA as in a past life he was leader of Britain’s famed Brodsky Quartet whose name is synonymous with the works of the Soviet maestro.

After the quiet and spacious opening movement there was plenty of horsehair shed from the bows in the furious allegro before Haveron’s beautifully shaped, sadly wandering solo in the slow movement.

A cracking night of five star musicmaking.s

DETAILS

• CONCERT Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Britten’s Serenade

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN August 24