For the second of his two BBC Proms with the august Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Principal Conductor Designate Klaus Mäkelä brought a diverse and well conceived programme to SW7 for this afternoon performance.
At the top of the bill was a sinewy, punchy account of Mozart’s D major Symphony no. 31, the Paris Symphony. The orchestral sound here was a world away from the rich string velvet and plush winds for which this orchestra is famed; instead, textures were translucent and articulation was incisive. Propelled by the dryness of Baroque timpani and robust contributions from second horn, this was lean, crisp Mozart which felt strikingly fresh. Great thought had clearly gone into shaping every line, with rich character to be found in the woodwind playing and careful attention given to string phrasing. After a graceful and poised second movement, this was particularly evident in the subtle crescendos and decrescendos of the finale, ultimately striking a pleasing balance of modern performance approaches with suitable respect for historical practice.
Sergei Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto followed, with Janine Jansen combining compelling musical theatre with moments of pure magic in the concerto’s softest corners. Such was the intimacy of her interaction with the orchestra that right from the outset, it was easy to forget that nearly 6,000 people were watching in rapt attention. From her very first lines, she played as if directly handing her sound to the woodwinds, passing it across the stage with the same delicacy one might afford a priceless glass antique. The orchestral strings responded in kind with a scarcely audible pianissimo, weaving the music of the first movement from gossamer threads. The Scherzo, by contrast, was a wild yet crisply articulated hurtle, before the finale returned to music of extraordinary softness and tenderness, Jansen seeming to share her sound with every player on stage before the concerto faded into a magical stillness, while Mäkelä held the vast auditorium to breathless silence.
The second half was cut from an entirely different cloth in Bartók’s ebullient Concerto for Orchestra, though there was still an exquisite sense of stillness and control in several places. In the opening movement, a thrilling accelerando gave way to a rich blaze of brass fanfares, while later on, the woodwinds played with the meticulously blended harmony of a well-voiced organ chord. There were, of course, too many outstanding orchestral solos to list here, though special mention must go to those from the bassoon and oboe principals for their brilliantly impish contributions in the second movement. The strings, in turn, played with shimmering beauty, existential anguish and redemptive stillness in the third, providing a solid emotional heart to the concerto. Though elsewhere the concerto’s darkest moments may have been darker than in Makela’s hands, here it was the beauty of the music which flourished.
The sardonic irony of the fourth movement, and its quotations from The Merry Widow (or alternatively Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony) was certainly not lost, however, and the finale rounded things off in a rollicking blaze of timpani fireworks and dizzying horn figures. Their Kodály encore was well-judged, neatly complementing the rest of the programme while reaching ever greater heights of wild energy.
