The Protecting Veil
Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Joanna MacGregor
Violin: Ruth Rogers
Cello: Guy Johnston
Brighton Dome, 29 March 2026
Born of profound religious conviction, John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil (1989), which gives this concert its title, is a mysterious, haunting, moving work whatever your point of view. It is, in a sense, a cello concerto in eight movements, telling the story of the Virgin Mary’s journey from birth to death. The cello represents her voice. Taverner regarded it as an ikon in sound.
I first interviewed Guy Johnston, with his brother Magnus (now concert master at Royal Opera House), for The Times when he was 16. It was before he won BBC Young Musician of the Year and the day after an appalling disaster had hit his family. I have followed his sparkling career ever since and it’s always good to see him, now 44, in action.
Guy opened and ended the piece with those strange high register notes which he made sing out ethereally. He played the lament with brooding reverence, coaxing mahogany tone from the 1692 Stradivari cello he plays, He is, as ever, an unshowy performer. The passion – and there was plenty of that – is invoked by fingers and note quality rather than by flamboyance. His quietest possible harmonic at the end came with silvery sadness and he and MacGregor on the podium, managed to hold the silence after the final note for the best part of a minute.
Otherwise, this concert was a showcase for the considerable talents of BPO’s strings. It opened with the always popular Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. MacGregor drew a pleasingly rich sound, especially from the cellos and there was plenty of warmth in the string quartet section with particularly lovely work from Caroline Harris on viola. The piece requires a “second orchestra” to accommodate the complexities of its scoring and it was a good idea to stand these nine players round the back of the main body of the orchestra. The balance worked well.
Max Richter’s responses/homages to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons are always worth hearing. This concert gave us two movements of his The Four Seasons Recomposed. His Spring and Winter were played, more or less attaca, after Vivaldi’s originals. The versatile Ruth Rogers, who usually leads BPO, popped out to don a bright green frock for this part of the concert. She played the famous violin solos and MacGregor conducted from keyboard set to harpsiechord. while Nicky Sweeney ably led the orchestra. The palpable rapport between MacGregor and Rogers was, as usual in BPO concerts, a powerful driving force. These mini concerti were slick, imaginative, thoughtful and fun. And full marks to harpist Elin Samuel, whose input was required for the Richter sections.
