Last night's Proms performance of Sibelius's Kullervo symphony was radiant, unforgettable, but there has also been a pure coincidence this past week which is simply too good to pass over unremarked: Thursday also saw the first-time publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's version of the same narrative, The Story of Kullervo.
It’s hardly surprising that at the grand old age of 86 Bernard Haitink can pack them in at the Albert Hall so that there’s no room left in the Arena and those still queueing 10 minutes before the concert have to go up to the Gallery. But he was also doing it back in 1978, when I went to hear my first Mahler “Resurrection” and found myself too late in the queue for the best standing-place in the hall, stuck in the rafters for the one and only time (never again). The Chamber Orchestra of Europe wasn’t even born then.
The only reasonable explanation for the all too belated arrival at the Proms of the SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Orchestra is that the festival’s house band, the BBC Symphony, is the one other ensemble reasonably entitled to claim the title of best orchestra for new music in the world. They came with a programme of Boulez, Ligeti and Bartók, 20th century classics all, and well-tailored to their talents. Too little, too late, as it turned out, but what an evening they gave us.
There were two reasons why I didn’t return to the Albert Hall late on Friday night to hear Andras Schiff play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first was that one epic, Mahler’s Sixth in the stunning performance by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, needed properly digesting. The other was that at Easter I’d heard Jeremy Denk play the Goldbergs in Weimar, and I wanted that approach to resonate, too – dynamic, continuous, revelatory, in a very different way from how I know Schiff approaches Bach.
Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have made the Shostakovich Tenth their calling card. Their recent recording of the work on Deutsche Grammophon has received universal acclaim, and now they're making their first European tour together, performing the symphony in London, Salzburg, Lucerne and Paris. It’s a great choice, a work that plays to all their strengths, conductor and orchestra alike. But this varied programme also demonstrated other facets of this versatile and increasingly distinctive partnership.
So here he was in town with his top American team, the already great conductor whose premature departure from Birmingham has left the players in mourning, unable to choose a successor yet, and whose insistence that it was too early to take up the coveted post of the Berlin Phil’s Principal Conductor blocked what should have been an obvious choice.
Praise be to Carl Nielsen. Praise always, of course, to one of the greatest symphonists, and happy 150th birthday (again), but gratitude on this occasion is due to a programme mostly lining up Nielsen works rare and familiar, for getting me to the Albert Hall to witness a surely unsurpassable performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto.
Drawing an audience of five and a half thousand in to listen intently is harder than pushing out into the vasts of the Albert Hall. Yet it’s what seems to work best in this unpredictable space, and last night masterful veterans Elisabeth Leonskaja and Charles Dutoit knew exactly what to do. The results were romantic introspection in Mozart - an unfashionable but valid alternative to authentic sprightliness - and a Shostakovich Fifteenth Symphony that was more skull than skin, but a compellingly decorated skull for all that.
Nearly 10 years ago to the day, an almost unknown 24-year-old Venezuelan conductor came a cropper when valiantly stepping in at short notice to conduct Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony at the Proms. (His name was Gustavo Dudamel. Whatever happened to him?) To pull off successful performances of Sibelius’s seven symphonies you need not just the ability to fire up players but the intellectual grasp to grip their elusive, fluid structures.
A second night of Sibelius symphonies at the Proms, packed to the rafters just like its predecessor. Exit Thomas Dausgaard, the tuba needed for the first two symphonies but not for the Third or – surprising given its pervasive darkness – the Fourth, and the air that had billowed around supremely supple performances. Enter Ilan Volkov to bring too much dark earth and inorganic point-making at first, though the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, its strings sounding tougher if less inward from a different point in the hall, was still on world-class form.