One usually has to wait until the fourth movement of a Bruckner symphony before one gets a decent, foot-tappin', knee-slappin' polka to dance to. But at last night's Prom Osmo Vänskä was jitterbugging - and, I think, even moonwalking - from the off, swinging his classy Minnesota Orchestra into the Fourth Symphony's opening fortissimo brass triplets like they were a seasoned jazz band, and making Bruckner boogie. Not the easiest of things to get this granitic old Austrian bumpkin to do.
Vänskä managed it by looking beyond the score. The slur that links the first two notes of that ever-present triplet is not merely a slur. It is a spring, off of which the final note must bounce, and land. A gymnastics of the most thrilling and virtuosic sort results if you are able to find it. Vänskä found it. And, more importantly, he got his Minnesota Orchestra to lend their flexible legs to almost every vault required of them.
Less detailed sculpting and reworking was to be had in the Andante. The chamber-like textures of this movement - which seem to be an evocation of an interior world that is suddenly, inexplicably, but gloriously, drenched in sunlight - lend themselves to a simple, unassuming approach. Virtuosity temporarily deserted the orchestra in the Scherzo and its tennis-rally back-and-forth, which, with its many foot-faults ricocheting excitedly around the orchestra, almost started to sound like Gruppen.
Freshness couldn't fail to spring from the Finale because it is unlikely that anyone (who hasn't bought Vänskä's recording of the Fourth) will have heard it in this form before. The 1888 version - Bruckner's third revision of the original 1874 symphony - edited by Benjamin Korstvedt, is a pretty unique choice. Vänskä is one of only two conductors of the hundred or so who have recorded this symphony to have gone for it. And it is only in the transition into the final peroration that the reason for this becomes clear.
Before this, in the first three movements, the differences to the earlier editions isn't all that noticeable, despite a greater organicism. And the major changes to the Finale - especially in giving the exotic little polka room for significant development - all appear to make perfect sense. But the cut at the start of the recapitulation brings in the glories of the last bars prematurely. This wasn't enough to dampen the joys of this performance as a whole.
Next to the dappled expanses and fresh open air of the Bruckner, Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto sounded more claustrophobic than ever. I admit now (with trepidation, for I know most will disagree) that I struggle with Shostakovich when he is in this unrelentingly suffocating mood. I fail to understand why we must be put through it. It reminds me of those horrid, exploitative Gaspar Noé films that force you to sit through every last detail of, for example, a grisly rape. It's miserablist torture porn in my view; self-indulgent, teenage, the Nirvana of classical music.
And not even the characterful way that Alisa Weilerstein played the increasingly haggard musical line could convince me of its merits - mostly because the character one is asked to follow has such a monochromatic emotional range. It does Weilerstein no favours, this music. Without her fabulous Bach encore - the Courante from Suite No 6 - I would have had no idea how interesting a musician Weilerstein really is. Nor would I have realised that this chick could rock.
The opening slice of juvenilia from Samuel Barber, Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933), an early tone poem, was, in spite of the way the ever-energetic Vänskä tossed the lone brass boats around on the stringed sea, as a piece, singularly uninteresting.
