Like London buses, you wait ages for a bit of Rachmaninov, and then you suddenly get three pieces all at once. In a nifty piece of programming for this year's Proms, Rachmaninov's last three compositions were played over three consecutive nights, but the delights of this particular concert were as much in the first half as in the second.
To stimulate the senses, we had the world première of Emily Howard's Torus, a concerto for orchestra written for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Vasily Petrenko, with whom she has had a long and fruitful association. Howard's fascination with how ideas from the world of science and mathematics can inspire musical creation has continued in her latest work. A torus is basically a ring doughnut shape. Howard visualised the image of "a sphere with its heart ripped out" during its composition, with the result that the void becomes as important as the substance. For this reason, contrasts are important in this work: calmness and nervousness; consonance and dissonance; fast and slow.
Torus uses an extraordinary array of musical techniques to create startling effects and meditative passages, with sudden bursts of fleeting and violent activity over quieter, slowly shifting harmonies. One of the striking features involved a cataclysmic outburst leading into a disturbing passage involving microtones and sinister glissandi increasing in tensile strength before fragmenting again. There were scintillatingly grotesque climaxes and ethereal, enigmatic passages before the music just disappeared in mid-air. The RLPO under Petrenko performed brilliantly, weaving the myriad textures and soundbursts with virtuosity and purpose to give the piece the respect it deserves. This was an accomplished and absorbing new work by a composer who is keen for us to hear the overall shape of the piece rather than become distracted by surface detail. This is a philosophy I like.
Shostakovich wrote his Cello Concerto no. 1 in E flat major in 1959 for Mstislav Rostropovich following an impulse stimulated by his admiration for Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto, particularly the way it had been written in adversity, a sentiment also shared by Shostakovich. In a change to the advertised billing, the young Russian cellist Alexey Stadler stood in as a last-minute replacement for Truls Mørk, who was unable to perform due to illness. Stadler revealed an unassuming but steely determination as he played with attack and rhythmic clarity in the sardonic march-like Allegretto, and with intensity and eloquence in the meditative second movement with a light, rather than rich, tone. The cadenza was well-controlled, and the Finale with its driving rhythms and folk tunes saw Stadler powering through relentlessly with sharp acidity and crisp, metrical precision. It did feel a little deliberate and methodical in places, but it was an impressive and convincing performance nonetheless.