Prom 67 had three works of great diversity – what could they possibly have in common? An English pastoral, a core repertoire Russian symphony and the most difficult of concertos (for soloist and audience). The concert headline was “BBC Symphony Orchestra plays Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony”, but a more revealing title might have been “Europe in Peril: Music of the mid-1930’s”. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on “Greensleeves” (1934) though is ageless; beguilingly announced by harp and flute (Daniel Pailthorpe, who had a peerless night), the warm BBC strings filled the hall with this soundtrack to Tudor England.
Soundtracks of Soviet Russia often deploy something from Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (1937). Young Finnish conductor Tarmo Peltokoski – yes another one off the Sibelius Academy production line taught by Jorma Panula, his other teachers including Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Esa-Pekka Salonen – clearly has impeccable pedigree and is already, at 24, a master of his craft. This showed from the way the BBCSO responded to his energetic direction in his Proms debut. This symphony though yet needs to get into his bones perhaps. A first movement exposition featured playing that was really much too quiet for this hall. The marking is piano mostly, but this was at the threshold of audibility, so the tension ebbed away. The development though was incisive and the inner two movements unproblematic, the finale stirring, but at a tempo surely swifter than the marked Allegro non troppo. The more usual steady tempo offers more cumulative power perhaps. But he is surely a talent our orchestras should engage.
European Jewry was especially imperilled in this era, prohibitions and abuse growing over the decade. Schoenberg, a native of the Leopoldstadt ghetto of Vienna, left for America in 1933, and wrote his Violin Concerto there in 1935-36. It is one of his mature dodecaphonic works (i.e. based on a sequence of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale), and one of the finest of them. It is still a rarity in the concert hall, but the combination of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the ever-venturesome BBC Proms, and the dedication of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja brought us a performance worthy of its stature.
The self-styled ‘PatKop’ is a Schoenberg advocate – she has performed as vocalist in Pierrot lunaire – and gave a short speech ahead of the performance. She mentioned and confirmed its challenging solo part, including the critic who said it won’t be playable until violinists grow a sixth finger (“I can wait,” said Schoenberg), and urged us to open our hearts and minds to the work – which her captivating account made it easy to do. Yes it’s a lance “hurled into the future” of music, but with backward glances, as if the composer has tucked in some “notes to self” among the score’s pages – “recall Brahms here”, “don’t forget to dance”. Dancing was rarely absent from Kopatchinskaja’s playing, so alert was her rhythmic response to this ever-shifting kaleidoscopic music. The composer breaks his own twelve-note ‘rules’ at times, to accommodate his musical aims, but never does the work look back by using repetition. Kopatchinskaja’s virtuosity and dead-centre intonation, even at the top of the range, was stunning, and the orchestral challenges were superbly met too. This 35-minute three-movement work became one long passionate song, never to be better sung than it was here by both soloist and orchestra.
