As the BBC Proms entered its final weeks, 2015’s birthday boys, Sibelius and Nielsen, took a back seat to Shostakovich. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, absent from the Proms since 2007, arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, flaunting a new, dynamic music director for its two appearances. Andris Nelsons — who only six weeks ago said farewell to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with a thrilling performance of Beethoven’s mighty Choral Symphony in the same Royal Albert Hall — is now a member of that select group of maestros whom the Berlin Philharmonic failed to appoint as Simon Rattle’s successor in 2018. The others include Daniel Barenboim, Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Chailly and Christian Thielemann, so he’s in good company.
Nelsons has clearly established a rapport with the BSO players in a relatively short time. Prior to his appointment four years ago as a replacement for his ailing predecessor, the venerable James Levine, he had conducted them only three times, the first reportedly a clinching performance of Mahler’s Ninth at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
For his BSO Proms debut, he chose Mahler’s thrusting, “tragic” Sixth, which he had performed during his last season in Birmingham. This is a symphony, according to the composer’s wife, Alma, writing with the benefit of hindsight after his death, that predicts the three blows of fate that were to befall the composer in 1907, the year after its premiere, when he was hounded out of his job at the Vienna State Opera, his daughter Maria died of scarlet fever, and he was diagnosed with the heart complaint that would kill him.
Modern Mahler scholarship has taken a generally dim view of Alma’s superstitious claims and turned its attention to the order in which the composer wanted the two central movements played. The great Mahler interpreters are almost evenly divided between those who play the mordant scherzo first and the spacious andante second, and vice versa. Nelsons takes the former option.
These are early days in his relationship with the BSO, so it was understandable on the first concert of its European tour that there was some ragged and overloud brass playing in the Mahler; and it was perhaps imprudent to have programmed Brett Dean’s Dramatis personae — an entertaining, gritty, sometimes tongue-in-cheek and brassy trumpet concerto, written for the still virtuoso Hakan Hardenberger — as a curtain-raiser. Yet, despite an andante that erred on the side of expansiveness, Nelsons kept the tension high in the “energico” allegro movements with which the symphony begins and ends. There is great depth in the Boston strings and brilliant woodwind soloists.
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They were heard to even greater advantage in the coruscating account of Shostakovich’s great “signature” wartime symphony, No 10, the one alleged to contain a portrait of Stalin in the menacing, totalitarian advance of its second, allegro movement. Earlier in this programme, an urbane account of Haydn’s C major symphony and a touching performance of Samuel Barber’s brief but poignant Essay No 2, for orchestra — another wartime piece — displayed Nelsons’s wide-ranging musical sympathies. This is a partnership of almost limitless promise, and Boston is lucky to have its young Latvian.
The Royal Albert Hall offered almost a mirror image of my previous week at the BSO’s summer festival, Tanglewood. There I heard Charles Dutoit conduct the orchestra in gripping, detailed yet unfussy performances of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. At the RAH, he led the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Shostakovich’s by turns witty — or bitingly sardonic — and harrowing valedictory Symphony No 15.
Less familiar Shostakovich came from the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen, who brought his Los Angeles Phil “discovery”: Gerard McBurney’s reconstruction of the prologue to the satirical lost opera Orango, which Salonen recorded in LA last year. It’s an amusing curiosity, rather than an important piece of the Shostakovich treasure trove, but huge fun in the composer’s gadfly vein. The Prommers were roped in to wave little red flags at what seemed like a Daily Mail caricature of a Jeremy Corbyn rally.