It was striking to read in the Proms programme-book interview with Mark Wigglesworth that what he’s currently enjoying is chamber music, pure and intimate and, significantly, “music that does not need conducting”. This diffidence about his own métier is salutary for anyone with a scepticism about star conductors. The writer Hans Keller ranked conducting among the “phoney professions” , and who has not on occasion felt the same? Perhaps even Wigglesworth.
Yet one was bound to think, as he began this concert with the BBC Philharmonic — its first half devoted to Brahms’s first piano concerto, with the soloist Stephen Hough — that self-questioning was an index of calibre. It was the most authoritative conducting, instantly masterly, I’ve witnessed so far at these Proms, Bernard Haitink’s appearance apart. And Wigglesworth seems close to Haitink’s level.
Hough’s playing was beautiful and poetically self-controlled, but it was the conductor from whom I couldn’t take my eyes in this concerto rendering. The opening orchestra stretch was a passionate mini symphony, draining in itself. One knew all would be right about this account because Wigglesworth’s intensity was unanswerable. He was more symphonically impressive here even than in the symphony, Haydn’s No 99, with which his unconventional programme ended (and did so twice over, thanks to a familiar but always effective Haydn trick).
He was masterful, too, with the modern item in between: not, for once, a premiere, but a look back some 20 years to the Proms London premiere of David Sawer’s rhythmically intriguing, altogether imaginative essay The Greatest Happiness Principle, inspired by the writings of Jeremy Bentham.
There’s much to be said for the vigorous Proms policy of presenting first performances, and a small amount to be said against it. It tends to usurp the space for the unusual, and rare repertory is left at a discount. It might be nice to have a balancing principle, as hinted at by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus’s concert under James Gaffigan, where a British premiere — Anders Hillborg’s Sirens (2011), a Homer-inspired cantata, post-minimalist in idiom, grandiloquent in approach — was preceded by an unfamiliar Korngold overture. This was The Sea Hawk, written for a 1940 Errol Flynn film and splendidly brassy, with a seductive lyric interior.
Advertisement
Equally, the world premiere of Julian Anderson’s piano concerto The Imaginary Museum, given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, with Steven Osborne as soloist, was enclosed — if not exactly a trade-off — between two infrequently heard Liszt symphonic poems. Hamlet and From the Cradle to the Grave were themselves having Prom premieres, and both were fascinating for the way they seemed at once to belong to, yet be at an angle to, 19th-century musical tradition.
Anderson’s six-movement construction was inspired by André Malraux’s notion of mental travelling, applied by him to artworks dispersed in collections across the world, and by Anderson to worldwide locations that, for him, have musical resonances. Wells in Janacek’s Czech birthplace, Hukvaldy, elicited delicious downward ripples from the pianist; and the travelogue, beginning with the soloist’s reiteration of a single note, as if (Anderson’s own suggestion) testing acoustics in the hall, opens us to sea, forest, desert and mountain.
As a concerto, the work is in no way a time-honoured dramatic dialogue between soloist and orchestra. Instead, the former acts as a kind of obbligato ornamenter, rather in the manner of large-scale Messiaen pieces. A dialogue he does have is with a synthesized second piano, tuned a quarter-tone apart: another Messiaen-ish effect in practice.
A fourth BBC orchestra, the National Orchestra of Wales and its Chorus, joined by the CBSO Chorus (a truly incisive vocal compound), were responsible for this year’s Beethoven Ninth performance, and before it the paralleling European premiere of James MacMillan’s A European Requiem (2015). An ambitious setting of the Latin Mass, this big-boned, heartfelt, immediately expressive score, no less than the Beethoven, showed Xian Zhang a prodigious wielder of huge forces: another unphoney conductor.