Ryan Wigglesworth is a man of many talents. He has recently been appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, but he is also a versatile opera conductor, and an operatic sensibility is clear in the musical personality he projects.
Hélène de Montgeroult: Études Clare Hammond (piano) (BIS)
If there’s a dud or a dullard among Sibelius’s 116 official opus numbers, I haven’t heard it. Yet catching even many of the outright masterpieces live in concert isn’t easy; the brevity that can show us a world in under 10 minutes makes some difficult to programme.
All hail, then, to the BBC and scholar/biographer Daniel Grimley for mapping the Finn’s legendary universe in three concerts of wall-to-wall Sibelius and another placing his two main pupils’ choral music alongside his own.
So John Eliot Gardiner’s fire- and-air way with Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis turned out to be the last night of the Proms. Just as I was about to cycle to the Royal Albert Hall for the first of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s two Proms the following evening, a notice came through: following the news of the Queen’s death at 6pm, the evening’s event had been cancelled.
Two quirky concertos – one for orchestra, though it might also be called a sinfonietta – and a big symphony: best of British but, more important, international and world class. Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounded glorious throughout from my seat – at 7 of the Albert Hall clock if the conductor is at 12 – but the eccentric charms of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Vaughan Williams fared better than the elusive soul of Elgar.
Russia meets Iceland: not the most obvious of juxtapositions.
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at the East Neuk Festival, the Elias Quartet led us gently by the hand with James MacMillan’s Memento. The 2022 BBC Proms began pianissimo, massed forces at the ready for the intermittent blazes of Verdi’s Requiem.
It’s a far cry from his beginnings in a tight, no-frills power-pop-post-punk three piece, that’s for sure. Last May, Paul Weller took to the stage with guitarist Steve Craddock, a smattering of guest vocalists and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to perform a career retrospective with new arrangements by composer-conductor Jules Buckley.
Did absence from Albert’s colosseum from early September 2019 until now and a roof-raising finale hoodwink many of us into thinking Dalia Stasevska’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Second Symphony among the greats? Having listened to it again on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer this morning, I'm convinced not; this was the real deal.
