First night of the Proms review – Batiashvili’s magnificent Sibelius opens the festival

Royal Albert Hall, LondonAn oddly disparate programme, including an Errollyn Wallen world premiere and a Vaughan Williams rarity, didn’t quite cohere in this opening concert, but all was outstandingly playedThis year’s Proms began with a curiously uneven concert. The programme, conducted by Sakari Oramo with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, felt oddly disparate. The main works were the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Lisa Batiashvili as soloist, and Vaughan Williams’s oratorio Sancta Civitas, a comparative rarity. There was new music, too, the world premiere of The Elements by Errollyn Wallen, Master of the King’s Music. Oramo opened, however, with Arthur Bliss’s Birthday Fanfare for Sir Henry Wood, before segueing, without pause, into Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, the latter most beautifully done, with finely focussed strings and woodwind, but something of a jolt after Bliss’s jaunty little piece for brass and timpani in honour of the Proms’ founder.Wallen’s new work, meanwhile, didn’t feel entirely successful. The Proms Guide argues that it explores the “periodic table of orchestral elements” that form the basis of composition, though Wallen writes, in her own programme note, that its prime concern is “the fundamentals of music, life and love.” It’s cast in a single-three section movement, the first dark and gritty, the second poised, elegant and sounding like Ravel, the third ringing changes on music from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. But it never coheres, and the Purcell quotes just leave you longing for the original. Continue reading...

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