FAINT HEARTS were turned away at the door for this Prom, which featured three works to make your flesh creep and your timbers shiver — Mussorgsky’s hair-raising Night on the Bare Mountain, Prokofiev’s vast and dark Sixth Symphony and the British premiere of a quite disturbingly frenzied Violin Concerto by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür. All the materials were there: a witches’ coven, a Soviet battlefield, a surreal nightmare of uncoiling energy. So it was disappointing when the BBC Philharmonic and the conductor Paavo Järvi under-did the intensity in their performance, and failed to turn this evening into a real thriller.
Though Järvi waved his stick around energetically like a musical Charlie Chaplin, and kept a vigorous command of tempi in the Mussorgsky and the Prokofiev, which opened and closed the concert, he felt just too safe a pair of hands overall, and the orchestra needed electric shock treatment.
The nearest we got to high voltage was in the music of Järvi’s friend and compatriot Tüür, whose Violin Concerto was the real blood-curdling meat of this concert, performed by the powerful Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen.
Like an athlete, she ran headlong into the theme dominating this intriguing work: a long series of razor-sharp and lightning-quick arpeggios that soon infested the whole of the string section, as soloist and orchestra were thrown into a duel across a battlefield of musical styles. Here were brutally dissonant cluster chords, violent bangs, crashes, slips and slides (think Tom and Jerry); there, the tintinnabulations and wide, still landscapes of that other big Estonian, Arvo Pärt; and now, pestering minimalist mosquitoes, and, even more shockingly, warm moments of trilling, sweet melody.
The sheer power, scope and energy of this music, whether suppressed and circling madly round itself in insane woodwind passages, or released through huge shudders of brass, percussion and strings, was a sound and sight to behold — the orchestra, though upstaged by the CBSO in a new CD of the work, did a fine job here at least. And van Keulen, still reeling off the arpeggios to the end, was cheered home like a marathon winner.