Part, Dvorak and Sibelius @ the BBC Proms

Arvo Pärt
Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
Dvořák
Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.53
Sibelius
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op.43

Isabelle Faust (violin)

Leipzig Gewandhausorchester
Andris Nelsons

On previous Proms visits (the first in 1988) tonight’s ensemble has often included repertoire bound up with the particular sound and history of what most reckon to be the world’s longest-established ‘civic’ symphony orchestra. This time the bread of the sandwich had more to do with the Baltic background of its current music director, Andris Nelsons. The filling had been intended as a showcase for Hilary Hahn until the unfortunate recurrence of an ongoing injury necessitated her withdrawal. In the event, the German violinist Isabelle Faust stepped in to perform a concerto she knows well, having played it since her teens and recorded it more than twenty years ago (and in a similarly resonant space). The conductor then was Jiří Bělohlávek. Faust gave a more reflective account under Bernard Haitink at the Barbican some years ago. Understandably equipped with the sheet music, she proved very much the star of tonight’s show. The high-lying solo writing, which may have hindered the work’s acceptance quite as much as Dvořák’s structural novelty, was dispatched without a hint of strain. While Faust lacks Hahn’s impervious, sometimes robotic, command, she summoned all her musicality to produce a performance to remember. It helps that Nelsons is such an excellent accompanist, never once swamping his soloist even when, as in the Adagio above all, she adopted a confiding, intimate manner, feathery vibrato applied to heartfelt expressive effect. The finale danced as it should but rarely does. The encore, well-earned for once, was apparently the work of London-based Neapolitan violinist Nicola Matteis (c. 1650-1713).

The rest of the concert was a little less wonderful. We began with the modest masterpiece with which Arvo Pärt, still with us at nearly ninety, made his mark at these concerts in 1979. The BBC Symphony Orchestra under its then chief, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, placed what was in fact the UK premiere of Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten in the context of established Russian classics: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture, Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto (the soloist the conductor’s wife, Viktoria Postnikova) and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The Soviet Empire has gone but Cantus never quite fits in. It would be nice to report that tonight’s audience listened with rapt attention but from my perch it was like visiting a bronchial sanatorium with a BBC broadcast proceeding mushily somewhere in the distance. A temporarily baton-less Nelsons, who introduced the score to his other, Boston orchestra as recently as 2022, began so quietly that the audience never really settled. Not his fault that we began with a walkie-talkie or similar device, but jollier Mendelssohn might have drowned out the coughing!

The Sibelius symphonies have had deep roots in the Boston repertoire, less so one suspects in Leipzig for all that the composer had a local publisher. In recent years the Second has shared the Proms limelight with the Fifth although for decades it was brought back virtually every year (sometimes more than once a season). Today, in a post-modern world suspicious of nationalist sentiment and rhetorical point-scoring, revisionists will tell you that the music is ‘about’ the composer’s personal life, that the second movement is too loose, that the finale is too repetitive or that it is the later works which stake out the essential new ground. Without giving us the kind of big band catharses such music ideally requires, especially in the final bars, Nelsons secured convincing results in sensible, would-be noble, old-school style. Tempos were quite broad, pregnant pauses on the long side, the playing distinguished if, at times, oddly generalised. While prominent dark-toned timpani gave the finale’s second subject and its climax a distinctive air, the contribution of the woodwind actually felt more potently idiomatic in the Dvořák. A full house, more appreciative than I have been, was not rewarded with an encore.