Unique journey into Elgar’s mind

Prom 51 BBCSO/ORAMO BBC Proms/albert Hall

This season has seen the Proms boast its first-ever cycle of Elgar symphonies, a claim based on it never having programmed the canonic First and Second plus Anthony Payne’s elaboration of the Third together before. There are good reasons why Elgar left the Third unfinished at his death in 1934 – maybe he recognised that not all the material was topdrawer stuff – but Payne’s achievement 60 years later was to get inside Elgar’s mind and to restore much wonderful music to us.

One of the triumphs of this performance was that Sakari Oramo, conducting with confident authority, recognised where not to linger and, equally, where to give Elgar’s late style its due. Some have heard echoes of Puccini in the work’s brazen opening, but then Elgar was always open to the European mainstream; the second subject, by contrast, is full of pure Elgarian yearning. The scherzo has a wistful delicacy that was marvellously achieved here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Rich playing underlined how the darkly anguished slow movement represents a different world from other Elgar – not because of Payne’s intervention but because Elgar was surely venturing into the unknown.

Elgar’s creative juices may have mostly dried up in the last 15 years of his life, but that was nothing compared with the 30-year “Silence of Järvenpää” that Sibelius endured in old age. As a prolific younger composer he had put his energies into the cause of Finnish independence, the centenary of which is being celebrated later this year. So it was fitting that Oramo, the BBCSO’S Finnish chief conductor, should have opened this concert with some of that music – the first suite from Sibelius’s Scènes Historiques. A rousing tune gives way to the old-world elegance of a minuet, and even if things turn long-winded, it was good to hear this rarely played music.

In these contexts, Saint-saëns’s Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor became a filler. It opened promisingly with the soloist Javier Perianes on warmly expressive form. But more brilliance was needed from everyone else to lift the work above the banal.