Art tackles social distancing and, for once, actually wins: Philharmonia Sessions reviewed

First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next came the Zoom ensembles, and near-infinite quantities of editing time and digital processing power achieved what, for a millennium up until March this year, could be produced instantaneously by putting some musicians in the same room. In June, we had live chamber music relays from empty concert halls. And now, after what might be the longest enforced break many orchestras will ever have taken, we have socially distanced online symphonic concerts: the latest, and let’s hope final, manifestation of this godawful New Normal (you’ll know we’re back to the Old Normal once critics start complaining about grey-haired audiences again).

This particular Covidcast came from the Philharmonia, and the main work was Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis: in the words of the conductor, John Wilson, ‘the original socially distanced piece’. He’s not wrong. The Tallis Fantasia is that most British of things, a modernist trailblazer that we’ve persuaded ourselves is a piece of cosy pastoralism. A good performance of the Fantasia needs to rewild it to restore some of the astonishment of the original 1910 audience at this ‘queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea’.

Wilson and the Philharmonia were just across the river at Battersea Arts Centre, where a scaled-down orchestra (around half the string players were absent) was scattered across the floor of the hall. The Fantasia’s strangeness became its strength. Vaughan Williams splits his orchestra into two spatially separated ensembles, and places his phrases and silences in such a way that they simply have to be given space to breathe.

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It was a particularly smart idea to book Wilson — a conductor without side or ego who knows how to transfigure the sound of a string section, whether the shimmering, May-mist luminosity of Vaughan Williams’s opening chords or the eerily cool, layered sound he drew from the second orchestra, like the fading ghost of some ancient reed-organ.