One vapid premiere aside, this was the music we needed to hear
Proms 2020 Lso/rattle Royal Albert Hall & BBC Radio 3
‘What is the music we need to hear right now?” That was the question Simon Rattle asked himself when he set about planning the London Symphony Orchestra’s Prom.
The straightforward answer would be: something uncomplicatedly joyous, but what Rattle and the orchestra actually came up with was much more interesting and rewarding. It took us on a journey through the many ways music can lift us out of the world, beginning in brassy splendour and dancing joyousness, retreating to a core of dark, lonely mystery, and ending in a mood of quiet and very English ecstasy.
The splendour came from two of those wonderful blazing “canzonas” for spatially separated groups of brass instruments by the late-16th-century Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli. They were played with notable delicacy by the LSO brass players, the three groups tossing the phrases back and forth across the Albert Hall, just as they would have done in the Basilica of St Mark’s in Venice, where the pieces were originally performed.
The joyousness came from Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings, which received a performance of rapturous intensity from the LSO. All hail to the violist Edward Vanderspar and leader Carmine Lauri for gilding the intensity with such heartfelt solos.
After that, the dusky mystery of the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – performed here with austere gravity by Mitsuko Uchida – felt like a dark night of the soul, and we went further towards the dark in the “mini-piano concerto” quasi una fantasia by the contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág.
Then came the return to the light, heralded by a brand new piece from Britain’s superstar composer Thomas Adès. Entitled Dawn, it began with one of his typically wide-eyed, radiant openings that turn out to be deceptive: the drifting up-and-down motion picks up speed, and soon you’re engulfed in one of Adès’s harmonic labyrinths.
But not this time. The guileless child’s musical-box tracing of the same up-and-down pattern in gongs and harp simply carried on, portraying (as the composer told us) the never-ending process of dawn rolling round the planet. It got a bit louder, and eventually ended in a noonday blaze of C major. It was “beautiful”, but dismayingly vapid. There were no glowing gong-andharp sounds in the final piece, Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony – in fact, its sound-world of ancientsounding string harmonies seemed austere compared with what we’d just heard. But the music has an inner glow which is worth any amount of ear-tickling aural dress, and that glow certainly shone out in this beautifully paced performance, which at the end seemed to rise up to infinity. It was indeed the music we needed to hear.
It took us on a journey through the many ways music can lift us out of the world