★★★☆☆
Both the advertised conductor and soloist withdrew from this concert because of “scheduling issues arising from the pandemic”. Without wanting to be the voice of doom, I fear that may become the story of this Proms season, even though quarantine rules are being relaxed (for now). Booking a ticket because you want to see a particular foreign musician is now a hazardous business.
Still, disappointing though it was not to hear Sol Gabetta, I was impressed by Guy Johnston’s playing in Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto. True, a greater contrast with the impassioned Argentinian could hardly be imagined. She has enough charisma to start a religion; he is the epitome of British reserve. Johnston’s sound is light and quirk-free, his intonation is pristine and his instinct is to let the notes speak for themselves without exaggeration. In a concerto that is itself marked by classical restraint, the approach worked.
The replacement conductor, Ryan Bancroft, was actually appointed principal conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales two years ago, although the American has had little opportunity since then to show what he can do. I wish he had shown more here.
His approach to Stokowski’s lusciously decadent arrangement of the Lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas was fittingly delicate and beautifully played by the BBC NOW strings, but I can’t recall a single striking idea in this interpretation of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. If Bancroft is going to conduct these overplayed classics he needs to find something new to say about them.
He did a much better job bringing out the constantly shifting textures and moods of Elizabeth Ogonek’s Cloudline, a 15-minute orchestral piece receiving its first performance. In her programme note the American composer makes reference to Walt Whitman, Georgia O’Keeffe and the BBC crime series Killing Eve. Ogonek says that she imagined “Villanelle, the show’s feral and mercurial assassin, swinging giddily from cloud to cloud as she prepared to pounce on her next victim”.
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I hardly need say that little of this is evident from the music, which uses microtones and a detuned piano to bring character to an otherwise rather surreal mishmash. However, I admired the craft with which Ogonek pitted extrovert flurries of woodwind and horns against much more placid string writing. And when the tempo increased, so did the excitement. Perhaps that was when Villanelle pounced.
To be shown on BBC4 on August 6, and then available on BBC iPlayer
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