Icelandic fire from Ollikainen, Moser and Thorvaldsdottir at the BBC Proms

The BBC Proms did it again on Wednesday night: yet another sell-out – seats full and the arena looking like one giant, happy game of sardines – this time for a bold, conceptually-bound programme from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Iceland Symphony Orchestra Chief Conductor Eva Ollikainen, centred around the UK premiere of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s new Cello Concerto, a BBC co-commission with Johannes Moser as soloist.

Edgard Varèse’s Intégrales came first. Premiered a century ago, this tersely pioneering act of rebellion against the standard symphony orchestra rejected stringed instruments, conventional tonality and melody entirely, in favour of timbres, intensities and durations voiced by 16 percussion instruments, five woodwind and six brass. Ollikainen’s tautly voiced and paced sound collage, conducted from centre stage amid the as-yet empty strings chairs, combined eerily, sophistically shaped phrasing with a tightly rhythmic vitality and momentum, the syncopations often vibrantly jazzy-flavoured. Intensity verily crackling off the musicians, it was an auspicious start to the night.

Unlike Varèse, Thorvaldsdottir hasn’t thrown tradition completely out of the window. The structure of her Cello Concerto fits the standard three-movement mould, the second rolling seamlessly into the third via a cadenza. Similarly, her harmonic language sits largely outside of tonality, but with tonal harmony used as a powerful colour; the first striking instance of this occurs early on, when sliding, long-bowed tone clusters in the strings suddenly tighten into a sustained tonal chord, rather like a pair of binoculars adjusting into focus. 

Like Varèse, sound effects and timbre play a starring role: sliding glissandi wails in the strings and the frequent employment of the wood of their bows; a large percussion presence, effects including rustling branches and low-rumbling thunder sheets; brass sending out Mexican waves of mouthpiece-less, pitchless percussive blowing patterns, reminiscent of jagged gusts of wind. The resultant music has one instantly thinking of mighty, ancient, craggily dark-hued and mist-covered terrain through which the cellist alternately wanders and rushes, sometimes at one with it, sometimes in battle. 

Johannes Moser and the orchestra meanwhile were thoroughly at one with each other and the music; and while this isn’t a work in which long-lined melodic writing holds much sway, where it does, in the central movement, Moser was beautifully plangently lyrical – as well as nimbly colourful through the cadenza’s rapid, cello-wide travels. The concerto ends with an isolated solo cello note, held then snuffed out, and as the subsequent applause thundered away – with Thorvaldsdottir herself now also onstage – there seemed little doubt that a formidable new concerto had landed.

Ravel’s Boléro, written four years after Intégrales, brought us up to the interval. The only predominantly tonal work on the programme, its own poly-tonalities and dissonances here leapt spicily into the spotlight across Ollikainen and the orchestra’s tautly measured crescendo from softly, silkily micro-shaded seductiveness to wide, glittering radiance.

Then a short second half, but a wild one, as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring dished up yet more elemental-feeling grandeur and danger, Ollikainen’s swooping, scooping two-arm dives visibly fuelling and embodying its knife-edge tension and snapping momentum. Brass and percussion glowed and thundered. Vibrato spanned the theatrical gamut from zero to wide lusciousness. It was an orchestra on virtuosic fire. And upon the closing bang, Ollikainen, rather than turning to receive the ecstatic applause, instead remained staring in open-mouthed delight at her musicians, then stepped off the podium into them, arms outstretched. Only when she’d had her moments with them did she finally turn to thank us – which felt as magnificent as the music they’d made together.