Prom 46
Royal College of Music Chamber Choir (Upper voices)
Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra
Sibelius Academy
Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Sakari Oramo
Soprano: Anu Komsi
Photograph: Chris Christodoulou
This concert was a rather moving collaboration between two fine conservatoires: London’s Royal College of Music and Sibelius Academy, Helsinki. We were firmly in Finland for the whole of the first half and then very much in Britain after the interval.
The Wood Nymph is not one of Sibelius’s better known tone poems although it’s full of the composer’s trademark brass fanfares, quivery strings and excitable crescendi as the melodramatic narrative behind Viktor Rydberg’s poem unwinds. It was beautifully played here by the massive combined forces of the two orchestras (eight horns) and I loved the sweet tone achieved by the principal cellist who gets a substantial solo in this piece.
I was, I’m afraid, less impressed by the world premiere of Lara Poe’s Laulut maaseudulta (“Songs from the countryside”). It comprises seven songs several of which are about cows. Anu Komsi rose to the challenge, however, and is very good at those big intervals involved in kulning – a traditional way of calling cows. She achieved remarkable purity of sound, almost without vibrato although she dropped the dynamic so dramatically at one point that she was drowned out by the orchestra, softly as Sakari Oramo had them playing. It was interesting to see Oramo, a fellow Finn of course, mouthing the words as part of his conducting. Moreover, a new piece of this complexity is evidently very good experience for young players. Nonetheless I didn’t find the work very appealing and noted that it ran for much longer than the estimated eighteen minutes.
And so to the glories of Holst’s most famous work. The Planets premiered at Queens Hall in 1918, conducted by Adrian Boult, (whom I saw live several times when he was very old and I was very young) but it sits so well in the grandiloquence of the Royal Albert Hall that it’s hard to believe Holst didn’t have this space in mind. Mars opened with all the rattling menace that the unsettling 5|4 rhythm requires and the string sound was terrific. Incidentally, in my distant youth I played for a mysoginist conductor who said that girls were innately incapable of playing percussion because they aren’t assertive enough. I wish he could have seen and heard Julie Scheuren hitting those timps at this concert.
There was contrasting gentle lyricism in Venus with some outstandingly fine horn work and plenty of sparky insouciance in Jupiter although the big tune was over milked. The whole work is an instrumental showcase – the bassoon in Uranus and the magnifence of the organ for example. No wonder the boy (maybe 10) sitting in front of me with his parents and younger sister was so excited he was miming snare drum, trombone, violin and more.
An otherwise excellent account of this splendid work was spoiled for me by Neptune. The movement is marked pianissimo throughout and when the choir enters it should be an almost imperceptible sound creeping in ethereally. It shouldn’t be so loud that it’s almost strident as it was here. Moreover, it wasn’t blended and you could hear (from stalls Block H) individual voices. Even the final fading away felt brashly mechanical.
And a final gripe. I do wish the tech people would stop fiddling about with lighting effects at the Proms. A performance of The Planets is not a sound and light show and I do not need the irritating distraction of different coloured lights to put me in the mood for each movement. I know lighting designers are glad of the work but …
