A tingle of anticipation suffused the auditorium ahead of John Wilson’s Prom with the Sinfonia of London. You could practically smell the endorphins. A popular programme given by musicians of the moment was bound to sell out, and the prospect of Benjamin Grosvenor playing Rachmaninov can’t have hurt sales. When the pianist withdrew for medical reasons late in the day the tills had already pinged; but never mind; for whoever got the gig this was Rach Two, so what could possibly go wrong?
Nothing at all, to judge from the ovation that greeted the performance by heroic stand-in Kazakhstan-born Alim Beisembayev; nothing at all if you like Rachmaninov’s great warhorse to have a classical edge. However, I felt for John Wilson and his roaring virtuosi as they reined in their exuberance to suit their new colleague, a 25-year-old who has lately been named a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. Beisembayev’s fleet, sensitive playing was anything but fat-fingered: in this most romantic of concertos it sounded low-voltage and even introspective in character, his heart in his head rather than on his sleeve. Alas, from my seat in the canyons of the Royal Albert Hall there were passages where his instrument’s audibility dipped below a comfortable level.
Wilson, generous to a fault, expended a lot of energy tailoring his own interpretation to the pianist’s ideas, but when he was let off the leash he was in his element and guided the Sinfonia of London in gorgeous surges of sound marked by hints of portamento and swooning dynamic shifts. When the massed violins hugged their big tune at the end of the second movement it seemed to trigger something in Beisembayev, who snapped out of his reverie to give the finale some much-needed wallop.
For the rest, only superlatives will do. The orchestra harnessed the electricity that greeted them in the hall to open proceedings with a scintillating account of Lili Boulanger’s late miniature D’un matin de printemps, a dappled five-minute tone poem that allows a morning chill to attenuate the sunshine.
After the interval, seatbelts unbuckled following their accompaniment duties, they lent fire and exuberance to an unforgettable account of William Walton’s First Symphony. The work has constantly survived the vagaries of Waltonian fashion, and with good reason. The first three movements are prodigious in both ambition and accomplishment: big melodic statements enlivened by complex internal harmonies that like act a capillary system to fortify and energise the musical material. The Presto second movement, played here with fabulous virtuosity, is a riot of fragments that tumble over each other in all the colours of the orchestral palette and yet, as though painted by a musical Jackson Pollock, all its splashes make sense. As for the Andante, Wilson’s reading was both controlled and sinewy, with a real bite to Walton’s chromatic crunches.
Notwithstanding the glowing advocacy of conductor and players, the symphony’s overlong Finale disappointed as it always does. It begins like Crown Imperial and ends in a mood of cod-Sibelius, but in between Walton pushes some meagre material round in circles, as though duty-bound to make his closing movement proportionate in length to the meaty music that preceded it.
