Adès impresses with ‘shock and awe’ but underneath it is empty

City of Birmingham SO /Gražinytė-Tyla

Royal Albert Hall, London SW7

The three pieces in this rich and thought-provoking Prom all rode under the banner of “symphony”, but that was almost all they had in common. First off was the Second Symphony by Ruth Gipps, an extraordinarily gifted musician who once took on the role of oboist, conductor and composer in a single concert. The orchestra on that occasion was the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, so it seemed fitting that this performance to honour Gipps’s centenary was given by the same orchestra, under the baton of its music director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla who, during her tenure, has proved a real champion of neglected British composers both male and female.

This symphony, which the 25-year-old Gipps composed after the end of the Second World War, traced her emotional journey through the previous traumatic years. The piece began in a spirit of pre-war innocence, the music often in the shadow of Vaughan Williams’s pastoral idiom but with a distinct harmonic restiveness.

It was not so much a contemplation of nature as a vigorous walk through it, as if new heartexpanding vistas were constantly appearing over the brow of a hill. The calling-up of her husband to military service and the festive departure of the soldiers to the front were all depicted with touching naivety, a quality beautifully captured in this performance.

From that heart-on-sleeve music, we passed to a new symphony which seemed devoid of all heart. Thomas Adès’s Exterminating Angel Symphony is based on his opera that was produced at the Royal Opera in 2017, in which a bunch of rich, oversexed dinner guests are trapped in a room by some unknown force. Their personalities and feelings are weirdly distorted as a result, a process mirrored in Adès’s sly twistings of musical idioms that in their original guise were packed with genuine feeling: a Ravel-flavoured waltz, a lullaby, an agonisingly slow descent in the strings where a ghost of some other composer was evoked, possibly Sibelius. Adès proved once again he is the master of “shock and awe” in music; here a glistening, silvery bit of harmonic magic, there a sudden obliterating, ear-shredding explosion topped with shrieking piccolo. By the end it felt as if my feelings had been relentlessly worked over by a brilliant and somewhat sadistic rhetorician who thinks stunning his audience is the same thing as moving them.

Does it really need to be said that the final piece, the Third Symphony by Johannes Brahms (a composer Adès famously despises) left the other two in the shade? Perhaps it does, in an era when musical judgment is apt to be swayed by ideology and special pleading. As always, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla cast a well-known piece in an interesting new light, making this taut, tumultuous symphony seem mysteriously intimate and spacious. Even when the interpretation didn’t convince, it certainly stirred one’s emotional life. After the previous piece, that felt like healing balm.