★★★☆☆
People say of their favourite actor that they would be happy to hear them declaim the telephone directory. I feel the same about the cellist Alisa Weilerstein, whose rich, chocolatey tone — served with marvellous grandness — is sometimes pleasure enough, even when the material she’s delivering is low on inspiration. We needed every ounce of her strength as she applied it to the frail textures of Outscape by Pascal Dusapin, co-commissioned by the BBC and given its UK premiere at the Proms under the baton of Weilerstein’s brother, Joshua, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
A host of venues and orchestras invested in Dusapin’s work. This will have been its most challenging performance, not because of the performers, but because its carefully calibrated lines — the players and soloist tracking each other through spotlit monologues — quickly turned to mush in the Albert Hall. Temple bells and ritualistic tambourines shadowed a snaky piccolo or a bass clarinet; the winds trembled while muted trombones delivered the odd rasp.
Weilerstein kept the energy up, but her repeated, muttered tremolos didn’t really carry under the higher-pitched lines. Over 28 minutes the piece was apparently supposed to bring orchestra and soloist towards each other — the “outscape” of the title — but the destination was unclear. Afterwards, brother and sister duetted, he now wielding a violin, in a Transylvanian duet by Bartók: a little too dark and mournful considering what had come before.
Weilerstein flanked Outscape with two other French works that explored extremes. The baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel began his dance suite Les élémens with a dissonant scrunch, a chordal depiction of primordial chaos that still startles; if the rest of the overture doesn’t quite live up to this explosion, it was good to hear it.
Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, a depiction of wild obsession, was tidily steered by Weilerstein, and some individual players shone, especially Christine Pendrill on cor anglais in the pastoral movement. Yet if I had to take someone to an opiate-fuelled Satanic bacchanal like the one Berlioz depicts, this affable conductor would not be top of my list.