Royal Albert Hall, LondonA programme – Bach, Beethoven and a Jessie Montgomery premiere – that looked odd on paper made perfect sense in the hall, with Abel Selaocoe a mesmerising soloist in Montgomery’s ‘These Righteous Paths’‘Thy magic power reunites / All that custom has divided / All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings.” The BBC can’t have known when they booked Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – culminating in Schiller’s ode to fellowship and unity – that it would mark Andy Burnham’s appointment as prime minister. Our new leader’s “gentle wings” will need the span of a 747 to embrace every warring faction beneath them, but what a welcome from a Proms concert that was everything the festival does best.A strange programme on paper – Bach, Beethoven and a brand new cello concerto – made absolute sense in the hall, where musical past and future were held suspended together in a rapt continuous present. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor set the tone. Arranged for orchestra by Andrew Davis, it had a distinct twinkle in its eye. Dutiful, even dogmatic, string exegesis takes a sudden sideways turn as the wind bend and distort the theme. And is that a celesta doubling the flute – a shimmering ghost in the orchestral machine, a childish distortion of the original organ? It’s wittily done, and under former chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra relished this fusion of sonic worlds. Continue reading...
Royal Albert Hall, LondonA programme – Bach, Beethoven and a Jessie Montgomery premiere – that looked odd on paper made perfect sense in the hall, with Abel Selaocoe a mesmerising soloist in Montgomery’s ‘These Righteous Paths’‘Thy magic power reunites / All that custom has divided / All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings.” The BBC can’t have known when they booked Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – culminating in Schiller’s ode to fellowship and unity – that it would mark Andy Burnham’s appointment as prime minister. Our new leader’s “gentle wings” will need the span of a 747 to embrace every warring faction beneath them, but what a welcome from a Proms concert that was everything the festival does best.A strange programme on paper – Bach, Beethoven and a brand new cello concerto – made absolute sense in the hall, where musical past and future were held suspended together in a rapt continuous present. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor set the tone. Arranged for orchestra by Andrew Davis, it had a distinct twinkle in its eye. Dutiful, even dogmatic, string exegesis takes a sudden sideways turn as the wind bend and distort the theme. And is that a celesta doubling the flute – a shimmering ghost in the orchestral machine, a childish distortion of the original organ? It’s wittily done, and under former chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra relished this fusion of sonic worlds. Continue reading...