BBC Symphony Orchestra
BBC Symphony Chorus
Sakari Oramo
Senja Rummukainen
Jess Dandy
Royal Albert Hall
Interestingly programmed, this concert ranged from one end of the 20th century to the other, working backwards, and sandwiched one of the most loved works in the repertoire between two much less familiar ones.
The opener was Jonathan Harvey’s Tranquil Abiding (1998) which is a meditative piece about meditation. It comprises a great deal of “breathing” with melodic fragments here and there. I admired the achievement of the very busy percussionist and reflected that the piece must be generally challenging to play. Hurrah for Sakari Oramo’s clear 4|4 beat. It was a pity that audience noise spoiled the mysterious, muted end.
Elgar’s lush, passionate, irresistible cello concerto (1918/19) was in good hands with Senja Rummukainen whose collaboration with fellow Finn, Oramo seemed unusually intense. They took the opening adagio very slowly and she really dug out the gentle angst in the first movement. There was tenderness and sweetness of tone in the lento section and she delivered Elgar’s “noblimente” melody in the final movement with such poignant beauty that it was almost painful. Overall, it was a fine account of a much loved work.
And so to Gustav Holst’s The Cloud Messenger (1909/10, revised 1912) which was completely new to me. It has never enjoyed popularity, flopped dismally at its first performance in 1913 and has never been performed at the Proms before. A large scale choral work, it also requires six percussionists, a soloist whose contribution lasts about five minutes, double brass, two harps and organ so it must also be prohibitively expensive to stage.
It is a setting of the poem Meghaduta by 4th/5th century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa which Holst himself translated and adapted. He had, at this stage of his life, become very interested in India. The text – a love poem in which an exile asks a cloud to convey a message to his wife – is pretty dire but it seems to have inspired Holst to some rather lovely music, although it’s a patchy, rather disparate piece
The star in this performance was the BBC Symphony Chorus, superbly trained by chorus-master, Neil Ferris. From their very first note the sound was richly arresting. Their diction is exemplary and their sound clear in the unaccompanied section in section five – so exposed and yet so perfect. I also admired the end of section four in which they sang the chromatic notes with panache and then, after an orchestral interlude, nailed the grand declaration. And as for the last few minutes which consists of ever quieter reiterations at different pitches (shades of Neptune, in The Planets which came only five years later) it was stunning.
One section of The Cloud Messenger requires a soloist and Jess Dandy whose contralto voice is as dark as molasses, did the job well enough although it might have made sense to use her elsewhere in this concert as well.
