The impressive sight, the huge sound and the powerful immediacy of no fewer than 107 young and energised players tightly packed onto the Cadogan Hall stage (plus wind and thunder machines and cowbells up above in the hall’s former organ loft) is not easily forgotten.
Odyssey Festival Orchestra is daring to do something different and, after four years of existence, is doing it very well. It is a London-based orchestra made up of players between the ages of 18 and 30, presenting dramatised concerts of large orchestral works.
This was the most ambitious project to date from the orchestra founded in 2022 by former BBC filmmaker and Roald Dahl official biographer Donald Sturrock and conductor Peter Ash (pictured below), the Artistic Director of the London Schools Symphony Orchestra for two decades until 2021. Orchestral standards at Odyssey are high, programmes are not just well thought-out, they are devilishly clever.
The pairing in this concert of Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6 and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, each throwing the other into relief, worked well. Both of these works, important outliers in the oeuvre of their respective composers, needed several iterations and revisions, and were necessarily, as the concert programme strapline described them, very different "responses to war".
One thing which Sturrock does particularly well is to find literary/musical parallels, and for this programme the spoken text for the first half witnessed the very different worlds of the three Berg pieces through the prism of Thomas Mann’s character Hans Castorp from The Magic Mountain, in a text adapted from Mann’s novel, and written for Juliet Stevenson. To have her involved was a masterstroke. Maybe no other actor anywhere could bring quite the level of vivid emotional authenticity that she did, particularly in preparing us for the third of the Berg pieces, “March”. The audience held its collective breath as Stevenson described the descent into the savagery of war through Castorp’s eyes. And that imagery remained in the mind as the piece unfolded, ending in the fatal, Mahler-inspired hammer-blow.
Peter Ash has vast experience in encouraging and lifting young musicians, enabling them to play at an astonishing level, and the standards reached are quite remarkable. The level of brass playing was particularly fine, and it was significant that the first player to be singled out at the end of the Berg in the first half was trombonist Ben Loska, and after the Strauss the whole trumpet section. The Strauss had both of the extremes which it needed, that contrast of infinite tenderness and huge heft. The unanimity of phrasing from the strings playing as one, and I would single out the poetry and flow which principal oboist Sasha Puller found for her big moment at the summit.
Another palpable ingredient of the Odyssey mix is the orchestra’s joy in music-making. Looking around the orchestra at the moment of arrival at the summit, all I could see was smiles. That joy also communicates itself to the audience. This orchestra has a unique way of bringing in a community of peers and its age-group to orchestral concerts. And that is something very special, valuable and necessary.
