MUSIC REVIEW : Rattle Introduces Holloway ‘Seascape’

Simon Rattle had introduced his youthful, energetic City of Birmingham Symphony to America on Tuesday at a concert in Orange County. He saved his major repertory novelty, however, for the debut of the orchestra at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Thursday.

The novelty turned out to be the U.S. premiere of a splashy 3-year-old tone poem by Rattle’s 44-year-old compatriot Robin Holloway, a native of Leamington Spa. His contribution bore an elaborate title--”Seascape and Harvest: Two Pictures for Orchestra”--and a fussy, probably irrelevant, impressionistic program.

“I told Robin to write a great, big, sexy Mahler symphony for us,” Rattle had told a Times interviewer. “It is very accessible, very gorgeous.”

Big and accessible, yes. Sexy and gorgeous? Well. . . .

The piece is, without doubt, thick yet flexible, gushy yet contained, complex yet easy. It is cleverly crafted, and it allows the orchestra to play its collective gut out for 30 long minutes.

In avowed homage to an indulgent past, it evokes Wagnerian chromaticism, the shimmery cliches of Debussy, lush Straussian harmonies, mercurial Mahlerian textures. It spans wispy symphonic sighs, gnarled meanderings and clangorous climaxes.

Rattle had cited additional references in the piece to Gershwin and Elgar. Somehow, these escaped at least one pair of ears lulled by the decorous decadence of it all.

Holloway’s allusions of 19th-Century grandeur sometimes come perilously close to delusions. He gives us the effect without the substance, the nostalgia without the core.

There are lovely passages, to be sure. There also are padded passages, turgid passages, busy passages and vapid passages.

Ultimately, this lofty ode to romantic manner threatens to become merely an exercise in romantic mannerism. It left one wondering about the sort of music Holloway writes when he looks forward instead of backward.

Rattle and his attentive followers played it with more bravado than finesse, ignoring the acoustical quirks of the unaccustomed, ill-attended hall. The 98-piece orchestra, incidentally, enlists 32 women. That must make it one of the best integrated ensembles of its kind in the world.

The remainder of the program duplicated the agenda reviewed by Daniel Cariaga on Tuesday: Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7 and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.”