Stage and screen provided the inspiration for the music in Gustavo Gimeno’s Proms debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Sergei Prokofiev, resigned to the fact that his opera The Fiery Angel wouldn’t be staged by the Staatsoper Berlin as planned in 1928, recycled music from the score in his Third Symphony. And although Erich Korngold turned his back on Hollywood after World War 2, his first postwar work for the concert platform, the Violin Concerto, deployed music from four of his film scores.
The Korngold wasn’t part of the original programme. Visa delays meant pianist Daniil Trifonov withdrew, once again missing a London engagement this year (four and counting). Vadim Gluzman stepped in and the Violin Concerto proved the highlight of the evening. His 1690 “ex-Leopold Auer” Stradivarius has a wonderfully rich tone, warmed here with throbbing vibrato and sweet, seductive top notes and an impeccable trill that completely suited Korngold’s lush writing.
Gluzman shaped his lines in the opening Moderato nobile movement with the care of a Lieder singer’s attention to text, while the central Romance was swoonworthy. The finale, based on a jaunty theme from the 1937 film The Prince and the Pauper, was played with glamorous attack, Gluzman brandishing his bow in extravagant end-of-phrase flourishes like a swashbuckling Errol Flynn. A Valentyn Silvestrov encore was an apt send-off from this Ukrainian-born player.
Gimeno opened with a suite from the music Bernard Herrmann composed for the 1958 Hitchcock thriller, Vertigo. The BBC strings blossomed into lushness in the Scène d’amour, but the two earlier numbers were less successful. The programme carried a quote by Martin Scorsese that “Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for – he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession.” Gimeno, driving the music with large, rigid beats, missed some of that sense of obsession.
There was a similar tameness to the performance of Prokofiev’s Third Symphony, another work rooted in obsession, in this case Renata’s visions of her fiery angel in Prokofiev’s opera of demonic possession and medieval witchcraft. Notable playing came down in the orchestral basement, trombones and tuba driving the juggernaut attack in the heavy opening movement which closed with a menacing contrabassoon growl. But Gimeno’s taut, tidy reading never quite let rip; glissandos had a quicksilver rather than queasy quality, the Scherzo – marked Allegro agitato – failed to bite. The percussion made a bid to cut loose at the start of the finale, with an especially satisfying tam-tam roar, but the closing chords lacked ferocity. This underrated symphony deserves a more compelling reading.
