A spell-binding curtain raiser to the season

Classical First Night of the Proms Royal Albert Hall

When the BBC SO’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo strode to the platform to conduct the First Night of the Proms, we were expecting Tchaikovsky’s great fantasyoverture Romeo and Juliet.

What we actually got was a spirited rendition of the Marseillaise. As a mark of respect to the victims of Thursday’s outrage in Nice, it was exactly right.

Then came the Tchaikovsky, and we were reminded once again what a romantic soul lurks under Oramo’s rather correct exterior. He took the big cello melody with luxuriant slowness, but it was so beautifully shaped that it never dragged.

When the angry music of the opening returned, Oramo created an electric tension, so that when tragedy finally enveloped the music, it felt like the crack of doom.

It was a shame the musical temperature dropped so markedly in the following piece, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The soloist, young Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta, was playing the piece for the first time. The problem was that the piece’s very delicate inwardness eluded her, just because she made such strenuous efforts to grasp it. Her tempo in the first movement was dangerously slow.

Later in the skittish fast movement she missed the humour. Only in the deeply nostalgic closing pages did she seem to be getting close the music’s heart, but by then it felt too late.

Finally there came Prokofiev’s cantata Alexander Nevsky, a rousing celebration of a great Russian victory over an invading Swedish army. The piece is long on vivid pictorial imagery and deafening songs of victory, but somewhat short on subtlety. On this occasion, Oramo reined in the music’s tendency to excess, so we could savour Prokofiev’s bleak harmonies and brilliantly effective scoring.

The emotional heart of the piece, a meditation on the valiant Russian soldiers who have fallen in battle, was sung here by Olga Borodina with quiet, spell-binding intensity.