The Proms season was early this year – looking at our collection of prospectuses we found that it has sometimes ended over a week later in recent years. We returned on Monday of the final week to hear Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic in a programme of music by Russian and Polish composers.
First up was Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony. I think that well performed this has its moments, but somehow it didn’t quite take off. It didn’t help that a large number of the audience arrived during the performance. Of course it is hard to know what to do when the first piece on the programme is long, and the end of the first movement is the first opportunity to admit latecomers, but there were an awful lot of them. Generally, this audience provided a lot of distraction – for example, I was near someone who brought her interval ice-cream back into the hall and finished eating it (scraping her spatula noisily round the carton) during the second half. Someone else was sharing a Ritter Sport bar in a crinkly wrapper with their companion during the music. And so on.
Szymanowski’s first violin concerto was played by Baiba Skride. This was a fine performance, which almost but not quite sold the piece to me. But it is a little too much generic early 20th century in its sound world – somewhere I missed picking up on the composer’s individual voice.
The second half was Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. I like these the most of his orchestral works – the point at which his orchestral style meets his church music, as he quotes a doxology from one of the settings in his Vespers. This quotation ‘overcomes’ a preceding allusion to the Dies Irae plainchant, much as the Russian anthem drives back the French one in the 1812 Overture. I enjoyed this performance, though there was some controversy about the very end of it. The encore was a piece by Geirr Tveitt.
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