BBCSO/Oramo review – Turnage’s satisfying and clever Festen Suite makes UK debut

Royal Albert Hall, London
The festering atmosphere of Thomas Vinterberg’s film and its celebrated opera adaptation lingers in this vivid orchestration, a foil to Sibelius’s cathartic second symphony

Sibelius’s second symphony is “a confession of the soul” – an outpouring, however ambiguous. But what happens when a confession never comes, and a secret festers instead in collective silence? That’s the starting point for Festen, Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film, which was adapted into an award-winning opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage and librettist Lee Hall last year.

There’s a fair bit of plot to a work in which incestuous child abuse is exposed during a patriarch’s 60th birthday party, but it’s the atmosphere that lingers, stylishly distilled in Turnage’s new Festen Suite – receiving its UK premiere here from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo.
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