Prom 16: John Storgårds conducts the BBC Philharmonic – Lawrence Power is the soloist in the Proms premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Viola Concerto. And Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4

Cassandra Miller
I cannot love without trembling (Viola Concerto)
BBC Proms premiere

Dmitry Shostakovich
Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op.43

Lawrence Power
viola

BBC Philharmonic

John Storgårds
conductor

The title of Cassandra Miller’s new Viola Concerto – ‘I cannot love without trembling’ – is a quote from the philosopher Simone Weill about the fragility of existence, expressed through the Greek funeral laments that are the basis of the Concerto’s five sections. This BBC co-commission (first heard last year) is an extraordinary and beautiful work, composed with an immediacy that gathers into a gauze of ritual loss and mourning – and that is before you adjust to big philosophical possibilities proposed with minimalist means but without any apocalyptic grandeur. 

At is most simple, the viola solo meditates on each lament against an orchestral accompaniment that advances and retreats, swells and withers. There is hardly any dialogue between soloist and orchestra, and there is one forte eruption from the trumpets and an unexpectedly Mahlerian solo for piccolo. The overall sense is one of quiet, slow, prayerful refinement. Miller’s use of the orchestra reveals a painterly ear of exceptional finesse, and played as such by the BBC Philharmonic under their Chief Conductor John Storgårds. As viola soloist, Lawrence Power compelled you to listen to the music’s flutterings, strange ululations, bell-like pizzicatos and moments of sweeping lyricism. At the end, Power froze his final bow-in-the-air flourish, holding it until the orchestra made its way to its own mysterious conclusion – an oddly moving sight.

The Concerto was diametrically opposed to the juggernaut that is Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4. He was working on it at the time, aged 30 in 1936, when Stalin had made known in no uncertain terms his disapproval of Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, making the composer an artistic untouchable. He withdrew the new Symphony, and it wasn’t heard until 1961, eight years after Stalin had died.

Although it seems to wear its heart on its sleeve, the overall effect of the Fourth is ambiguous. Soviet military terror, a funeral march, and the composer’s already characteristic caustic asides create a sort of Breughelesque parade, and there is a strong flavour of Mahler, particularly the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony. Storgård gave full rein to this cinematic panorama, and the BBC Philharmonic responded with some magnificent playing – isolated wind solos, a lost scrap of waltz for violin, massive brass outbursts, and even more annihilating tattoos from the two sets of timpani. If the ending to the quietly sinister second movement was cryptic, the Symphony’s closing pages flatlined to nothing, as if to say, ‘What was that all about?’ Any piece of music is manipulative, but I do wonder if Shostakovich didn’t overplay his hand here, especially after such a cracking performance as this.