Proof that classical music isn’t always best in moderation

Like all intoxicants, classical music is best taken in moderation. But sometimes, you need to dive straight in. Wednesday night’s two Proms proved the need for such recklessness. In the first we had the fluttering erotic yearnings of Ravel’s song-cycle Schéhérazade, the orchestral sound rendered with delicious fingertip delicacy by the Philharmonia Orchestra under principal conductor Esa-pekka Salonen. Then, at the opposite pole of deafening orchestral grandeur, came John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music.

After only an hour to recover, came the second Prom, from the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by their founder John Eliot Gardiner. The splendour of three Psalm settings by Heinrich Schütz passed before us like a gorgeously coloured procession, with bright fanfares of cornets and drums answered by voices and violins. Finally came two cantatas by JS Bach.

The first movement of Bach’s cantata Feste Burg is an incredible compositional feat. Sometimes Gardiner drove the speeds and dynamic surges a little hard, but his careful attention to the words, and the excellent soloists, particularly counter-tenor Reginald Mobley, made everything glow with meaning.

The earlier concert from the Philharmonia topped even this. I often find John Adams’s quasi-religious triumphalism a bit much, and his Naive and Sentimental Music is a particularly strenuous example of it. But Salonen articulated the numerous ascents in complexity and grandeur so convincingly that he (almost) brought me round. Marianne Crebassa, the soloist in Ravel’s Schéhérazade, really did melt all resistance. and made it seem genuinely moving.

Hear these Proms on the BBC iplayer. Proms are broadcast live on BBC Radio 3