Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto @ The BBC Proms

Igor Stravinsky
The Song of the Nightingale

Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto in E minor
Encore

Carlos Gardel
Por una cabeza 

Anthony Davis
Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey (UK premiere)

Richard Strauss
Till Eulenspiege

Augustin Hadelich – violin

BBC Symphony Orchestra
Sakari Oramo

A musical bestiary – of sorts, including nightingales, both real and mechanical, a superstar violinist, a cheeky monkey and an even more cheeky medieval imp – came together for a wonderful Prom masterminded by Sakari Oramo and the Proms’ house band, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in its second outing of the 2025 season.

Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale is something of a rarity at the Proms: this was only its seventh performance after first gracing the Royal Albert Hall’s stage in 1971 nearly five months after the composer’s death. That was one of two performances by Pierre Boulez, whose birth centenary is celebrated this year. 

Fashioned after he had returned to work on his opera The Nightingale post The Rite of Spring, ostensibly as a short ballet score for Diaghilev, this symphonic poem contains some vintage Stravinskian sonorities and rhythmic ticks, as it encapsulates Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the emperor at first enamoured of the nightingale’s song then, fickly, wants a mechanical version, at which point the real nightingale flees. When the emperor is dying the real nightingale returns and sings him back to health. There’s an environmental message in there, certainly…

Oramo’s players rose to the challenge and presented Stravinsky’s teeming score with characterful detail, not least flautist Charlotte Ashton as the (real) nightingale. Such instrumental virtuosity was still to the fore in the final work, Richard Strauss’ impish Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, each episode vividly projected. Seemingly, Strauss had told Sir Henry Wood that if you got the audience to laugh you would know you had given a good performance. While I didn’t hear guffaws, I certainly had a smile on my face throughout, extending past the performance itself as Oramo gestured first for the instrumental personification of Till himself to stand up, E-flat clarinettist Chi-Yu Mo, and then for the all-important horn section to do so.

Immediately before the Strauss, at the start of the concert’s second half was the European premiere of a piece by American composer Anthony Davis. Curiously entitled Tales (Tails) of the Signifying Monkey and, in fact, the third of three off-cuts from his opera Amistad, which can be played together as a symphony, this introduced the audience to another trickster, this time a monkey of many an African legend who hoodwinks the king of the beasts, the lion. Curiously, from Davis’ own description his music solely concentrates on the monkey, who certainly has a way with an 11/8 waltz rhythm, often intoned by the bassoons. There’s a slower central passage evoking the ocean (a change of scene not really explained) before the jazzy rhythms power back in with (so Davis tells us in his own programme notes) references to the other two ‘movements’ of the quondam symphony, Esu Variations and Jacob’s Ladder. Best known for his operas (his first, in 1986, was X: The Life and Times of Malcom X), his visibility over here has been minimal, his clarinet concerto, You Have the Right to Remain Silent, premiered by the Britten Sinfonia last year, notwithstanding.  I would like to hear more.

Finally, to the centrepiece of the concert. One of the most popular concertos of all time, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, minted totally afresh (and to start, at some vigorous speed) by Augustin Hadelich, whose popularity had certainly contributed to the capacity crowd in Kensington Gore. Muscularity and ineffable sweetness come so naturally to Hadelich, and he can spin a silk-like solo line as well as dig into his strings when needed. The audience were spellbound, and he was greeted by the best ovation so far this season. Yellow roses were proffered to him from the front row of the Prommers and he was called back again and again, eventually offering us a perfect encore, Carlos Gardel’s tango Por una cabeza.  Definitely something special.