The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Proms under their Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth have been fluff-free zones. Sunday night’s account of Bruckner’s Seventh was an exemplary modern account capturing the special flow of the piece in what felt like a continuous, 65-minute span of thought. On Monday evening, they addressed Harrison Birtwistle’s Earth Dances and Beethoven’s Eroica, and to equally illuminating effect.
Now 40 years old, Earth Dances invites reappraisal. Orchestras at home and abroad have played it as a late-20th-century Rite of Spring, long on violence and deep, shuddering momentum, shorter on detail. A recent re-edition of the score may help, by doubling the note-lengths and thus thinning out the (still considerable) rhythmic complexity, but Wigglesworth inflected the piece with a revelatory lightness of touch, doing justice to both words of the title.
Underlining an allegiance to the world of Stravinsky’s Petrushka as much as the Rite, Wigglesworth’s attention to specifics of phrase and gesture shaped long melodic cantilenas in an English strain of melancholy which is Birtwistle’s heritage, from Dowland to Vaughan Williams. Strong and snappy beats – which used to land like death-blows in a primal rite – punctuated those melodies with a poetic lilt, as musical translations of Spenser and Pope, with even a sardonic “hey-nonny-no” thrown in now and then. A covert four-movement form emerged, not symphonic but resembling the four tableaux of Petrushka, with a long finale launched by busy counterpoint on low strings: Birtwistle at his most Tippettian.
Beethoven makes a fine complement to Birtwistle, as another composer with a profound feeling for the natural world around him and the ground beneath his feet, restlessly asking the big questions. Countless moments to treasure in this Eroica Symphony included a perfect realisation of the early horn entry anticipating the recapitulation by a bar, as a composed mistake. The trio of horns were heroes throughout: Cristian Palau Tena, Hector Salgueiro and Lauren Reeve-Rawlings. Amid playing of tremendous stamina and collective focus it feels invidious to single out further shining examples, but Matthew Higham also deserves mention for flute solos which, like the first half’s Birtwistle, danced and sang as though words had become subsumed within a more visionary narrative. String articulation would have been clearer still with divided violins, and the basses could have been profitably elevated from their huddle behind the cellos.
Back when Earth Dances was first performed, in March 1986, Wigglesworth’s one-in-a-bar swing for the Eroica – not slavishly tied to Beethoven’s metronome marks, but not far off them – would have sounded daringly precipitate. Now it feels entirely natural, and all the more true to the pathos of the Funeral March, for the ornaments in the main theme to be accented with a Francophone nobility anticipating Berlioz. The variation finale’s main theme, on the other hand, has never sounded closer to the fugue subject of Mozart’s Jupiter, which was surely turning in the back of Beethoven’s mind. Wigglesworth brings a creator’s mind to this repertoire. We, and the BBC Scottish, are lucky to have him.
