There was a welcome adventurousness about this programme of new music given by the BBC National Orchestra under the baton of Gemma New, with two UK premieres and the first performance in his native Wales of Huw Watkins’s Second Symphony.
Jessie Montgomery’s 2017 score Coincident Dances has in one respect already fulfilled its brief, in being choreographed for a spring performance by Miami City Ballet. Opening with an unusual double bass solo, its subsequent fusion of English consort music, samba, Ghanaian mbira, swing and techno was intriguing, occasionally leaping vividly into life – as in Philippe Schartz’s clarion trumpet call – and with a touch of Bernstein, if not quite the chutzpah.
