An unforgettable display of precision and tenderness
BBC Philharmonic/ Juanjo Mena
Afeeling of nausea came over me in the first half of last night’s Prom. The queasy ineffability of wunderkind Mark Simpson’s new work Israfel, as well as Dutilleux’s cello concerto Tout un monde lointain, combined to create an unsettling experience. Then, with an incredibly beautiful, cogent performance of Elgar’s Symphony No 1 in A Flat Major, the best I’ve ever heard, my anxiety was laid to rest.
Simpson, a young shaver of 27, has caused quite a stir recently with Pleasure, an opera set in the toilet of a gay nightclub. With Israfel, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about the Koranic angel, Simpson continues to prove his versatility as well as considerable technical talent, although the ten-minute piece never quite built to the robust conclusion I hoped for. The score was marked by passages of calm which then gave way to disorientating sliding strings and vibrating brass, a bit like finding a maggot in a perfect-looking apple. The tempo slipped towards the end, as if the BBC Philharmonic were struggling for intellectual clarity.
A lack of clarity also surrounds Tout un monde lointain, the masterwork of Dutilleux, commissioned for the great cellist Rostropovich in the late Sixties.
It is a consciously fiendish piece, inspired by Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, which offers a musical equivalent of that sensual collection of lyric poems. Cellist Johannes Moser brought a technical assurance and was tightly in charge, while conductor Juanjo Mena expertly controlled the orchestra as the string and brass sections zoned in and out like shadows in a dream.
But Moser seemed reluctant to share his emotion and the occasionally haunting beauty of Dutilleux’s score never quite rose to the surface.
After the interval came Peter Maxwell Davies’s Sir Charles his Pavan, with an introduction by violinist Julian Gregory who spoke eloquently of the late son of Salford’s links to the BBC Philharmonic (once the BBC Northern Orchestra).
Then came the Elgar – an incredible display of precision and tenderness that will linger in the memory for a very long time. Like the works that preceded it, the symphony is not without its troubling aspects: the false serenity of the opening soon gives way to a crazy descent into D Minor and then, in the second movement, a demonic scherzo, performed here to perfection.
But it was the slow third movement, with Mena eloquently guiding us into the emotional heart of the symphony, which scored so highly, drawing audible gasps from the audience at its end. It was an extraordinary moment in an evening which frequently attacked the senses.