The corridors felt less of a scrum than the previous night with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Yet once in, the Royal Albert Hall felt no less packed to its flying mushrooms for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonc Orchestra and Domingo Hindoyan. Clearly people had sussed that this Americas-centred BBC Prom was one of the ones to make a beeline for, and they weren’t wrong.
Adolphus Hailstock’s concert overture, An American Port of Call, came first: a rip-roaring orchestral fireworks show of teeming, contrasting lines, textures and rhythms depicting a busy American port city, written back in 1985 despite this being its European premiere. Hindoyan and his musicians grasped it swaggeringly by the horns, from its opening brass punches and shrilly sweet jazz clarinet smears. In tune with the entire first half, it was a real brass showpiece, topped towards the end by an atmospheric, superbly executed trumpet solo descending from high-register brilliance to super-controlled piano, although the strings were also wooing the ears for all they were worth with their smoothly silky, MGM-style sweep. It was rewarded with a roar of audience approval – magnified as Hindoyan swivelled immediately around and pointed into the stalls to where the composer himself sat beaming. Now spotlit, Hailstock stood up, acknowledged the audience, and blew a delighted kiss towards the stage.
But now, it was time to calm everyone down, because next up was Jennifer Higdon’s single-movement Blue Cathedral, an other-worldly depiction of a soul travelling through a sacred space and upwards into the heavens which was written in 2000, shortly after Hidgon had lost her younger brother to skin cancer. Hindoyan exited the stage, and waited. It worked, and the ensuing poised, steadily onwards-floating, constantly sonically shifting journey concluded with a no less superbly controlled cameo from the young percussionists of Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Company and In Harmony Liverpool, expertly blending their steadily rustling egg-shakers into the chiming, shimmering final chord.