Dukas
La Péri – Fanfare and poème dansé
Michael Berkeley
Violin Concerto (In memoriam DR) [BBC commission: world premiere]
Prokofiev
Romeo and Juliet, Op.64 – Suite from the ballet arranged by Jac van Steen
Chloë Hanslip (violin & electric violin) & Diego Espinosa Cruz González (tabla)
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Jac van Steen
Reviewed by: Peter Reed
Reviewed: 27 July, 2016
Venue: Royal Albert Hall, London
For the second of its four Proms this season, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales took to dance in two ballet scores and the rhythm-fixated new Violin Concerto from Michael Berkeley.
The Dukas and the Berkeley had been well prepared by the BBCNOW’s former Principal Guest Conductor Jac van Steen, but even his fastidious and methodical attention to the impressionist aural paraphernalia of La Péri (the same faery species that inspired Schumann in his Das Paradies und die Peri) could disguise the fact that this is music that struggles to stand on its own. It was, though, beautifully played, the brass section standing for its Cinemascope-style opening fanfare, and in the Poème dansé itself, the woodwinds elegantly laid down dabs of body-colour and larger brushstrokes of expressive tone over gently gleaming strings, and the brass, trumpets in particular, spun a cleverly recessed, distant sound. The Péri was a spirit-being nourished only by the scent of flowers, and Dukas’s music is correspondingly languid and reliant on dreamy repetitions to make its case, bulking up briefly for the climax when Alexander the Great accepts that he must die for love of her. The score is more impressionist soundtrack than impressionism in music, but the BBCNOW and Van Steen did wonders keeping the shimmering construct dipping in and out of the light.
The same attention to detail and a particular musical identity marked out Michael Berkeley’s Violin Concerto as a major achievement for the composer. He has written it ‘In memoriam DR’ – Deborah Rogers, Berkeley’s wife, who died two years ago – and he has folded in other influences in the sequence of three movements, played continuously: Nigel Kennedy using an electric violin in a tribute to Jimi Hendrix – hence the instrument Chloë Hanslip plays for most of the third movement; Berkeley’s own earlier tribute to his partner, At a Solemn Wake for cello and piano, recast as the ‘Elegiac, wistful’ slow middle movement; and the obbligato role for tabla that has a strong presence in the first, a result of Private Passions meetings with Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney.
- Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 (available on BBC iPlayer for thirty days afterwards)
- BBC Proms www.bbc.co.uk/proms