The BBC National Orchestra of Wales is currently very much an orchestra in waiting. Taadaki Otaka has gone; Richard Hickox has gone; and their new principal conductor, Thierry Fischer, is due to raise his baton at the start of the new season. For the time being, Otaka, as conductor laureate, was called back to fill the vacuum — and the orchestra’s Prom had a strangely retrospective feel to it.
Otaka has made a speciality of the Russian repertoire, and Tuesday’s programme of Shostakovich and Rachmaninov drew a large audience. For Han-Na Chang, the 23-year-old Korean cellist, Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto is very much a calling card: her recent recording drew plaudits far and wide. Either the recording engineers were extremely canny, or Chang was simply not on form for her Proms debut. This was a performance more highly strung than truly intense, more edgy than energetic.
A sense of struggle is no bad thing in this work: it was written, after all, for Rostropovich’s exceptional talent, and his has always been a hard act to follow. But for much of the time the work simply seemed out of Chang’s reach, both physically and expressively. The effort made by every player on stage in the opening movement left little room for any pointing or dynamic shaping. Was there simply inadequate rehearsal time? The cello’s fragile folk song, in duet with the clarinet, was eloquent enough. But the massive Cadenza was barely coherent, and seemed to drain Chang of any energy for the finale. The entire experience was rather like listening to two sets of machinery — never quite in harness one with the other, and both in need of overhaul.
Otaka has recorded all the Rachmaninov symphonies, and the BBCNOW played well enough for him in the Second to hitch the star-rating up to three. But this hour-long symphony needs to be conducted in such a way that it makes you sit up and listen. There are ways of preventing the work from tipping over into sentimentality and vulgarity, but Otaka failed to find them; and only the quality of the orchestral playing itself saved the day.