Having been away in remote mountain places, I hadn't heard that the BBCSO's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek was taking a month off to recover from a virus. So it was a bracing last-minute shock to find the man stepping up to the podium to conduct Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude not the orchestra's wise Hans Sachs but a Walther von Stolzing in conducting terms, tipped unexpectedly by one source outside the BBC as Bělohlávek's successor. Lean and hungry Dane Thomas Dausgaard masterminded the most brilliantly co-ordinated Prom I heard last year, and he excelled again last night. As the programme's central cabinet of curiosities did not.
There's a very good chance we may yet hit Lisztian gold at the Proms with Marc-André Hamelin's Wednesday late-night recital and the demonic treats promised in the Budapest Festival Orchestra's visit, but the second of the Hungarian's Three Funeral Odes, La notte - orchestrated in part from the Michelangelesque piano piece Il penseroso - overstayed even its 12 minutes here. Not that Dausgaard didn't make the most of the bleak bass lines, especially in the reprise of the outer-section funeral march, and the promising hint of a rosy, fluty dawn that fizzles out before hope of revisiting the fatherland can take wing; but the hint of Berlioz's originality only served to remind us that Liszt was never quite the Frenchman's equal in instrumentation.
Straightish repeats in Romantic music may not always be welcome, but the arrogance of a contemporary composer who, the programme note told us, "mistrusts the whole idea of 'form'" bred in this case ever more diminishing returns of interest in the audience. South African-born Kevin Volans's Third Piano Concerto, his latest self-proclaimed journey to nowhere, might have worked better as an aleatoric piece, with the interchange of soloistic and carefully selected orchestral chords left to chance; for their ferociously complex notation must have set up an extra level of difficulty, not just for Dausgaard but also for the pianist, that might not have been apparent to most listeners.
Barry Douglas (pictured right by Mark Harrison) needs more to shine at his transcendental best than just those chords interspersed with equally random-seeming toccata writing. Process is all, the essential hooks of idea and gesture sparse - a high-register pecking figure, the silvery essence of some of the orchestral pillars, a belated rolling of drums. It's not enough for a concerto of this length. Result? An indifferent response from another full house, depriving us even of the encore Douglas should have been persuaded to give us.
The familiar framework of the programme, though, came up far fresher. It looked as if Dausgaard was going to give us a whippet-like pack of Mastersingers, strings clipped and incisive at the start, but after the first civic processional, the Wagnerian line blossomed; the apprentices mocked with wonderful character from the BBC Symphony woodwind, Dausgaard stood back from the meeting of the three big themes to let the orchestra do its thing, and I heard details from the horns I've never encountered before (though that may be a trick of the hall unique to where I was sitting).
Not having been here for Haitink's weekend Brahms, nor been back for long enough to catch up on Radio 3's "Listen Again" facility, I can't compare this First Symphony with the other two featured on Friday and Saturday. But I do know from recent experience of his LSO cycle that, for all his easy mastery, Haitink does indeed "reason not the need" for the impetus behind the music, as Ismene Brown put it in her review of his second Brahms Prom; and the same could be said of Barenboim in his Berlin Philharmonic performance of the First in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre earlier this year, at least up until the most electrifying last two minutes I think I've ever experienced in a concert. Dausgaard's Brahms is fluid, alive, unpredictable, turns a few dangerous corners but always keeps you guessing - as, we sometimes need reminding, Brahms does when, unlike Volans, he cares enough about "form" to subvert it, at least in the First's last two movements.
In an interpretation that never slipped from supple humanity into stock gestures, we were constantly made aware how beautifully and without apparent effort Brahms writes for his standard-sized orchestra, both collectively and individually; those peerless solos so interestingly limned just kept on coming, but special honours go to first horn Nicholas Korth not only for alp-horning the great solo across the chasms in the finale so peerlessly - hauntingly echoed by flautist Daniel Pailthorpe - but also for joining so collegially with leader Stephen Bryant's violin solo in the ineffable, plains-of-heaven slow movement before letting the fiddler go his own way. And it was good to discover that Dausgaard doesn't just do crisp and quirky, that he can unwind when the programme's two great composers do too. Whether or not he does indeed become the BBCSO's new chief conductor - one player I bumped into afterwards, contradicting my outside source, thought it unlikely - they could do worse than work with him at least a couple of times every season.
