Respighi, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams @ the BBC Proms

Respighi
Pini di Roma

Milhaud
Le Bœuf sur le toit (version for violin and orchestra)

Vaughan Williams
A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2) [standard version]

Arabella Steinbacher (violin)

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Vasily Petrenko

The Royal Philharmonic may lack the high profile and sonic weight of starrier guest ensembles but their playing can be no less remarkable. In the Respighi and Vaughan Williams pieces here there was total, symbiotic interpretational unity with the man waving the stick, something rarely seen in this parish since the heady days of Sir Thomas Beecham. Preoccupied with clarity and definition rather than the nth degree of charm, the results (and the repertoire) were of course rather different.  

The Russian-British conductor began with Respighi and at once expectations were challenged by an astonishing precision of rhythm and texture. Pedal notes on the Royal Albert Hall organ added extra weight but the chief wonders were the whispering strings and eloquent winds including a particularly lovely clarinet (Katherine Lacy). Some ‘surround sound’ effects made use of the venue’s architectural idiosyncrasies. The recorded nightingale felt over-prominent in the hall, apparently issuing its call from somewhere up in the dome. Meanwhile, as the pines of the Janiculum faded from view, brass players crept noiselessly to take up strategic positions on either side of the organ console. Finesse edged out any sense of vulgarity along the Appian Way, Respighi’s implacable final tableau built with patient gradations of sonority, everything masterfully controlled. 

Milhaud’s music has largely dropped out of the repertoire and it was audacious to offer Le Bœuf sur le toit in the arrangement the composer himself made for violin and orchestra. I was not familiar with this manifestation of a once-popular score and on first hearing was slightly perplexed at the way Milhaud had downplayed the woodwind contribution. This tends to undermine the work’s local (Brazilian) colour though not the polytonality or ‘wrong-note’ aspect of the writing. A vision in dusky, discreetly sparkling pink, a species of cape built in, Arabella Steinbacher relished the humour in the piece but for me Arthur Honegger’s interpolated cadenza added another layer of confusion. Having seemingly played the score as the first among equals rather than projecting a big-boned concerto-soloist vibe, Steinbacher nonetheless offered an encore, deconstructed Bach as featured in the ‘obsessive’, quotation-heavy first movement of Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 27 / 2.

After the interval came a rendition of A London Symphony as fine as any given in the capital for at least half a century. While Petrenko had conducted a splendid account with these players at the Royal Festival Hall in 2022, not everything sounded identical, the finale now accommodating an even wider range of tempos and emotions with no loss of focus. Three years ago there were a few technical flaws and fluffs of the kind that might have been expected: the surpassing eloquence of the horn’s evocative rising fourths in the slow movement were not matched by the contribution of the solo viola. This time however Alexander Edmundson and Abigail Fenna played with supreme accuracy and eloquence, moving at least one listener to tears. Vaughan Williams pulls off a not dissimilar trick at the very end of the work and why not?  This was again the standard concise score rather than one or other of the newly fashionable alternatives discarded by the composer along the way. The first movement was taken at a considerable lick, nervy, not always comfortable, the intention perhaps to banish any lingering vestige of Edwardian self-satisfaction. The (very) slow movement was surely un-improvable, profoundly moving without sentimentality, muted strings providing yet more stunningly hushed playing. Hard to fault a scherzo which prioritized absolute rhythmic definition over looser pictorial evocation. As I have argued before, Vaughan Williams the symphonist belongs in the mainstream of concert life, not stuck in some dingy Anglo-Saxon corridor. While many critics continue to undervalue this terrific score, at once glamorous and prophetic, Petrenko plainly takes no detail for granted. Nor was he in any hurry to re-enter the world of mundane reality at the close. There was applause after the first movement, rapt attentiveness then gradually taking over, the silence holding. 

The concert attracted a decent crowd given that it was assigned an 11am post-breakfast slot, the BBC’s latest Proms scheduling wheeze.