Aspects of Love @ the BBC Proms

Strauss
Don Juan, Op. 20

Bernstein
Serenade (after Plato’s ‘Symposium’) for solo violin, harp, percussion, and strings

Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé (complete ballet)*

James Ehnes (violin)

*Sinfonia of London Chorus

Sinfonia of London
John Wilson

Reportedly one of the first concerts to sell out this year, this Prom will not have disappointed John Wilson’s admirers. A pity so many of them had risen from sickbeds to cough their way through the generous programme.

Though thematically linked by aspects of love, this was a bill of fare that kept the emotion on a leash, vigorous and direct rather than gushing. Don Juan set the tone, brilliant though not particularly deft or Mendelssohnian, a mite unyielding. The critic Richard Osborne once rather waspishly criticized the string playing of one of Claudio Abbado’s much-admired youth orchestras as being ‘cultured in the sense of being carefully fashioned yet completely without culture in the sense of being “grounded” in any recognizable tradition, Austro-German or otherwise’. It would be uncharitable to accuse John Wilson’s supergroup of ‘failings’ – only in Daphnis were the tricky rising horn figures at one point less than secure. The chorus remained astoundingly in tune throughout. Still, one could see what Osborne was driving at. Coming so soon after the Vienna Philharmonic’s display of burnished, unruffled magnificence, the music-making of the Sinfonia of London had sharper contours, quieter pianissimos, no trace of complacency but also a certain deracinated quality. 

Bernstein’s Serenade is virtually standard repertoire these days, its slow start attributable in part to its cumbersome full title. One sometimes wishes that he had given the percussion less to do, and Wilson was careful not to let the string textures be swamped. At the same time he seemed not to want the faster episodes to ‘swing’. Was that idiomatic? What should we make of the whole notion of composing a serenade in the wake of the Second World War for all that Korngold and Harold Shapero had recently composed large-scale examples? Neither of those resembles a violin concerto but Bernstein had no qualms about challenging classically ordained terminology, complicating things further with the programmatic superstructure he appended to the almost finished score. On one level this re-contextualizes Stravinsky’s more austere Grecian preoccupations as if in jest. On another, Bernstein had been re-reading Plato’s Symposium on honeymoon and its bibulous speculations regarding the varieties of love may have provided an intellectual bolthole from the narrow ethics of McCarthyism. His Serenade presents a series of comparably interlocking statements in which each movement stretches the thematic elastic of its predecessor. It is this sophisticated aspect rather than surfaces, romantic or frisky, that James Ehnes emphasized in his somewhat circumspect, technically faultless rendering. His tone, not especially large, was as beautifully formed as ever – there was some mention of his special Stradivarius before an immaculate encore, the Allegro assai from Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1005.Wilson’s players had never once drowned him out. While the balance was right, this Bernstein was spry, even chilly, rather than cool or ‘hip’. In a Strad interview last year, the soloist talked about the way the score keeps its options open: ‘With this piece, you can dive as intellectually into it as you like, but on the other hand, it’s just a big party that makes for fun listening. There are multiple access points for different levels of the listening experience. For me, perhaps the best quality of instrumental music is how wonderfully non-specific, which allows people to interpret it as they like. Still, in this piece, Bernstein strikes a fantastic balance between giving clues that allow people to go down the winding path, should they want to.’

John Wilson’s commercial recording of Ravel’s full ballet score was preceded by a thoroughgoing COVID-era re-examination of available sources and the production of squeaky-clean performance material. That may or may not influence the forensic way he conducts it. His exalted ‘scratch’ band contained the customary slate of moonlighting principals and section leaders; many individually acknowledged at the close. The violins included several stars – it was suggested that Ehnes might have joined them at the back (I couldn’t confirm that) but we had Thomas Gould behind leader Charlie Lowell-Jones. All shone, achieving a crystalline transparency not always obtainable from conventional desks and ensuring the audibility of wind and brass. As in the studio the flautist was Adam Walker. The concluding ‘Danse générale’, never noisy or thick, was so fast that details felt a little snatched or cramped. A matter of taste perhaps. Earlier, moment by moment revelations of colour, texture and dynamic had been prioritized over a looser (Gallic?) sensibility. Wilson’s conducting physically projects his priorities, from the dramatic crouching to the unrelenting stick-focused technique. An encore, the ‘Panorama’ from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, had wonderful poise, a quality sometimes lacking in the Ravel despite its iridescence. Again, the smallest details of string articulation had been addressed with discreet slides animating the line. Quite something!