Classical music has much to learn from Liverpool

They do things their own way in Liverpool; they always have. In 1997 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra launched a contemporary music group called Ensemble 10:10 (the name came from the post-concert time-slot of their early performances). For a decade now, they’ve also administered the Rushworth Prize, an annual competition for young composers based in the north-west. And while classical fads and crises have come and gone, the RLPO has held its friends close and tended its garden. The result? The kind of artistic self-assurance that lets you put your chief conductor in charge of a première by a novice composer, and then call in a Barenboim to guarantee a full house.

It’s hard to imagine a piece like this winning a major prize two decades back

At any rate, that’s what they did last week, when Ensemble 10:10 premiered Danu’s Rhapsody by the 2023 Rushworth Prize winner Sam Kane. No apologetic pre-concert slots here; no fobbing off with an assistant conductor. When Liverpool picks a winner, it goes all in. This was a main season première, with a 44-piece ensemble and Domingo Hindoyan conducting. Michael Barenboim was the violin soloist in the other two works in the concert: Kareem Roustom’s 2019-vintage First Violin Concerto and – 100 years old, but still the toughest nut on the programme – Berg’s Chamber Concerto.

Kane’s piece surprised me; in fact, his programme note was startling enough. Danu is an Irish nature-goddess, who ‘encounters mythical creatures and dances with the forest’s faeries’. It could almost be a Bax tone-poem – one of those lush Celtic fantasies like Tintagel or The Garden of Fand. It sounded a tiny bit like Bax, too, but in a good way. Clarinet melodies sloped like shadows between leafy murmurs and the violins struck up a whirling reel. It all moved towards one of those crowning, gorgeously tinted orchestral sunsets that we’re supposed to think went out of fashion somewhere around 1918.