In the wider scheme of world affairs the problems of getting musicians and their instruments on to planes probably don’t amount to what Humphrey Bogart would have called a hill of beans. But it’s clear that the new security measures have ominous implications for touring. We may be returning to the pre-1914 era when orchestras never left their home cities except by train. (In those days, of course, you could depend on trains.)
Already there has been one casualty. The Orchestra of St Luke’s, from New York, was to have given this Prom and an Edinburgh Festival concert, but pulled out when its transatlantic flight was cancelled. With five days’ notice the City of London Sinfonia and Paul Daniel stepped into the breach and commendably agreed to play the programme unchanged.
A pretty odd programme it was, though. If there is logic in lumping together eerie Lutoslawski, neoclassical Stravinsky, minimal Wagner and maximal Mozart — except the self-serving logic of showing off in four totally unrelated musical styles — it escaped me.
Still, taken individually each piece was interesting. Daniel made up for an efficient but unsparkling reading of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks concerto by conducting a tenderly phrased reading of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll. But it was clear that most of the rehearsal effort had gone into Lutoslawski’s Paroles tissées, the Pole’s 1965 setting of the Surrealist poet Jean-François Chabrun.
Lutoslawski uses his favoured technique of “ad libitum” (but carefully calibrated) string writing to build up intense bursts of scurrying sound, then floats a disembodied vocal recitative over the top. Ian Bostridge does disembodied floating well; his pianissimo top notes seemed plucked from the air. But his bloodless timbre failed to dominate in the one big climax, even though Lutoslawski deploys only strings, piano and percussion.
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Daniel clearly enjoyed himself in the Jupiter Symphony, at one point leaping off the podium as if intending to ask the principal cello for a dance. At times his interpretation — lively but eccentric and sometimes a touch unhinged — did sound as if it had been concocted over a congenial lunch by a committee of Thomas Beecham, Roger Norrington and Lewis Carroll. But at least the show went on.