A giant leap for womankind in a Proms first

ago, this encounter could never have happened. Both parties would have been grizzled, and male.

So no, the Proms is not entirely stuck in the past. Of course, there are some things that never seem to change: the cosy grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, the give-and-take between populism and seriousness, the constant looking back at Proms history. This year there are innumerable connections to that history, including a focus on the “novelties” or brand-new pieces brought to the Proms by Sir Henry Wood, the Proms’ visionary founder.

But that’s only one side of the Proms coin. The other is that precisely because the Proms is so massively prestigious and freighted with big issues beyond music, it’s a hugely sensitive barometer of changes in cultural politics – so the focus on women is highly significant. As for the music of this opening night, it was neither the choral-andorchestral blockbuster we had in days of yore, nor the display of season “tasters” sometimes favoured. Instead it offered a satisfying upward trajectory of intensity, beginning with sounds of extreme gentleness, taking an unexpected turn to folksiness, and ending with a blaze of glory. The new piece, Long Is the Journey – Short Is the Memory, from the Canadian Di Castri was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. Like almost every young composer, Di Castri professes a fascination with the expressive qualities of pure sounds, and she certainly conjured some fascinating ones. The players had to rub bits of paper together, blow compressed air into milk bottles, and scrape harp strings with a tuning key. But these breathy, scratchy noises were often gathered into a huge major chord, topped with glistening harmonics that gave an unearthly edge to something warmly familiar.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra under Canellakis, an American, played with feathery delicacy, and the BBC Singers, flinging out ancient Greek and Chinese poems, as well as an early poem by Leopardi, held stratospheric high notes for what seemed like forever. Overall it was often beautifully suggestive, marred only by the curious samba-like rhythms accompanying Sappho’s poetry.

The next piece, Dvořák’s The Golden Spinning Wheel, took us into a world of kings, peasant maidens and wicked stepmothers, and a magic spinning wheel which uncannily “speaks” the crime. In this performance the kingly dignity and drooping maidenly pathos shone out, but the stepmotherly shiver down the spine was missing.

By contrast, Janáček’s wild, pantheistic Glagolitic Mass was altogether wonderful. Canellakis understands that this music’s wildness is actually best expressed by making Janáček’s often bizarre orchestral textures and jagged rhythms crystalclear. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus revealed the music’s tenderness as well as its fierceness. The quartet of soloists, above all the tenor Ladislav Elgr, soared heroically, though it was Peter Holder’s wild organ solo which stole the show – as did the piece as a whole. In the end, joy and energy carried the day; let’s hope it’s prophetic of things to come.

Watch this Prom for 30 days on the BBC iPlayer and hear it on the BBC Sounds app. The Proms continue until Sept 14: 020 7070 4441; bbc.co.uk