Thomas Adès
Aquifer
UK premiere
Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 4 in E flat
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Sir Simon Rattle
conducto
Reviewed by: Curtis Rogers
Reviewed: 5 September, 2024
Venue: Royal Albert Hall
On this day after Bruckner’s bicentenary, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with their chief conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, appeared for the first time together at the Proms, for the composer’s Symphony No. 4. It received a generally lithe, airy reading, but also with no want of depth or beauty in the sound (Rattle leading without a score). Indeed, it tended to grow in grandeur and weight, opening with a brisk luminosity, as though disavowing the murmurings and half-lit mists of dawn over a mediaeval town, with which Bruckner’s famous description of the Symphony starts. Rather, there was more mystery in the similar shimmering transition around eight minutes in, ushering in the first movement’s development, with its first radiant sequence of chords for strings and brass. The Andante second movement was flowing without too fast a tread – not so much increasing the tension with each doleful, funereal phrase as spinning out a long, yearning cantilena.
Horns and trumpets set the Scherzo ablaze as though it was only here at last that the Symphony arrived in the colourful array of full sunshine, instead of back at the introduction to the first movement when it lands about one minute in. Otherwise, the Scherzo was jovial and playful, nicely contrasted with the relaxed Trio. As with much else in the Symphony, the finale was flexible without compromising the bigger structure, the changes of pace and musical material effortlessly handled, and culminating in as searing an ascent of chords at the end as could be desired. Throughout the Symphony the orchestra brought out a range of detail – particularly in discreet woodwind or brass dialogues – that often go unnoticed, testament as much to the clarity of their playing as to the 2021 edition of the work by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs.
If Bruckner’s Symphonies are often described as elemental, then it is by analogy with mountains, or at least cathedrals of stone. Opening the Prom was the UK premiere of Thomas Ades’s Aquifer (commissioned by this orchestra and conductor) which is inspired by one of the other four primal elements, water. Its seven sections, dissected in the programme note, cohered as a seamless unity in the performance itself as Rattle did justice to the music’s surging and ebbing course, holding a sustained background against the more sharply defined thematic activity in the foreground. Again, the orchestra’s supple and lucid playing served the music’s cause well in its heaving and foreboding mood, the fluid delineation of big blocks of sound complementing – not merely imitating – the Bruckner which followed. In between, Rattle awarded Adès the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal.