Cool cat: Martin Fröst purrs at the BBC Proms

Martin Fröst is into his 50s now, but he’s still the coolest cat on the clarinet circuit. Who better than the snake-hipped Swede to pay tribute to not one, but two jazz clarinet legends in this Proms outing with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra? 

Aaron Copland wrote his Clarinet Concerto for Benny Goodman in the postwar years, when the “King of Swing” was commissioning works from classical composers. Just 18 minutes in length, its two movements segue from serenity to snappy jazz, linked by a finger-crunching cadenza. Goodman’s great rival Artie Shaw – who once quipped, "Benny Goodman played clarinet. I played music." – wrote his own, even shorter, concerto in 1940. It expanded on a piece that Shaw had performed in the Fred Astaire movie Second Chance and it became a huge hit.  

Together, these concertos made a tremendous showcase for Fröst’s playing: liquid tone, lightning fingers, note-bending, a grungy, almost vocal roar that revved into gear and oily glissandos. Fröst is a conductor himself these days, and he coaxed the violins and cued the piano like a pied piper. The BBC Philharmonic took a while to hit their rhythmic stride in the Copland, but come the Shaw – where the string ensemble was bolstered by big band brass, four saxophones and a drum kit – they found their groove. After a declamatory soliloquy, Fröst bopped along to a drum riff before ending on a stratospheric altissimo C, launched into the Albert Hall’s acoustic mushrooms where it’s probably still dangling. 

Then came the encore where Fröst played the arpeggios of Bach’s C major Prelude, inviting the Proms audience to sing Gounod’s Ave Maria over the top… which they did, rather magically. 

The Shaw concerto was the first time any of his music had been performed at the Proms. Joshua Weilerstein had opened his programme with another Proms debut: French composer Elsa Barraine. She studied with Paul Dukas, where one of her classmates, Olivier Messiaen, became a lifelong friend. In 1929, Barraine became only the fourth woman to win the Prix de Rome, launching a compositional career that encompassed around 150 works. She worked for French National Radio as a pianist and sound recordist, was active in the French Resistance, and later ran the record label Le Chant du Monde and taught at the Paris Conservatoire. 

Barraine’s Symphony no. 2 was composed in 1938 under the threatening shadow of war; indeed it is subtitled “Voïna”, the Russian word for “war”. It’s a pungent work, packing a lot into its 17 minutes. The bustling Allegro vivace, with its menacing snare drum, has a sardonic overtone, not unlike Prokofiev; it is followed by a Marche funèbre which is not very marchlike, but is certainly sombre, before a perky neoclassical finale tosses off the gloom. Weilerstein, conducting with a soft, fluid beat, led a tight performance that made a strong case for Barraine’s music. 

The fourth work in a programme spanning just a decade was Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, the exiled Russian composer’s final work and the only one written in its entirety in the United States. Jazz showed its influence here too – Carl Raven’s alto saxophone solo caressed the central interlude of the first movement – but Weilerstein’s relaxed tempi didn’t always drive the music strongly, often preferring to milk Rachmaninov’s melodies. Woodwind solos were beautifully taken, though, and credit to Weilerstein for signalling to the audience to remain silent, allowing the apocalyptic final tam-tam crash to resound around the hall.