by A gentle feger of the arms to the outside, a troubling silence and then the slow bloom of a floor -heavy small chord in the strings. More than a century after the audience was taught, silence. But the 10th excursion of the BBC Symphony Orchestra this Proms season die under the composer director Thomas Adès-War a more subtle affair.
Sibelius’ sound poem of the swan of Tuonela presented that the bindingly unpleasant start started. The strings settled in a light, bright backdrop, over which the Cor Anglais twisted and climbed. Adès grabbed the front and up and held the orchestra like under a magic: the brass, which seemed to float from a large distance, the melody, which ultimately appears, calmly and spacious.
The British premiere of breathing forests, an organ concert by the California composer Gabriella Smith, was brought into life in a colorful shot Tremolo and repetitions, the strings and the upper woodenwind in almost constant movements, while he learned a meaning for larger business with a form of greater area possible. In the midst of periodic parts of Arpeggios in Philip-Glass-style there were more fascinating details: strange squeak and pitch bends, faulty tonal chords that dissolve when landing, the glacier crucars of arches that were pressed in strings and cluster chords, as if a toddler had been left on the organ handicrafts. A large part of the work was densely orchestrated, and Smith produced a kind of ecosystem in movement-convincing than living sound landscape than as a finite structure.
After the interval, two musical reactions came to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Adès’ own five spells from the storm drove out of the bubbling storm, loudly and hurled over Ariel’s Mercuriale, angular woodenblas to be able to elegant court dances for Ferdinand and Miranda. Sibelius’ The Tempest – Suite No. 1 (under his last completed works) showed even more radical atmosphere, between boring language and a remarkably slim, brave modernity. Like Prospero, Adès presided and enthusiastically committed when he conjured up weakening woodwind solos and symphonic textures of fearless, square aggression.
• Listen again BBC Sounds by October 12th. The proms continue until September 13th.
