Prom 7: Orquestra Simfonica de Barcelona/ Lawrence Foster, Royal Albert Hall, London
A lack of enthusiasm
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Your support makes all the difference.So, here we had a Spanish, or more specifically Catalan, symphony orchestra making its Proms debut under an American conductor, with a Russian soloist, in an evening flanking a classic German-Jewish concerto with three 20th-century Spanish items – except that one of them was by a Catalan of Swiss-German parentage who ended up an English émigré. This was certainly internationalism with a vengeance. Whether it made for a coherent programme was another matter.
The opener was Roberto Gerhard's Concerto for Orchestra (1965), composed in Cambridge during his final decade, when the richly sensuous Schoenberg-tinged Spanishry of his earlier music had long since given place to a streamlined avant-garderie of sonorous shocks and frissons. Was there a subtext here of getting the nasty modernism in the programme out of the way first? Even the most crack orchestra might quail at the prospect of this fiendishly virtuoso music unwarmed-up, and the Orquestra Simfonica de Barcelona had no more than average success in keeping the more jagged string lines and high pizzicati together.
That said, the energy and resonance of their reading under the exemplary direction of Lawrence Foster were impressive enough; still more so in their account of Manuel de Falla's complete score for The Three-Cornered Hat (1916-19), which concluded the official programme. Even the pantomimic sections, which can sound merely episodic in concert performance, were effectively held together by crisp tempi and witty characterisation of the orchestral solos.
There was much delicacy, too, in the often exquisite scoring of the late Xavier Montsalvatge's Cino canciones negras (1946-49), with the mezzo soprano Jennifer Larmore as warmly vibrant soloist: five gently pleasing Spanish-West Indian settings, including the "Lullaby for little Black Boy" that has become something of a standard number.
The question of what the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was doing in the middle of all this was at least held in abeyance for its duration by the distinction of its performance. With Viktoria Mullova inflecting her fine-spun tone by the most sparing use of portamenti and sensitive gradations of vibrato, and Foster responding with the deftest of rhythms and textures, this had the contained intentness, almost, of chamber music. Yet in the end, this was not a programme that generated, through its specific choice and ordering of items, the cumulative concentration and enthusiasm that its elements variously deserved.
The BBC Proms: to 19 Sept (020-7589 8212; www.bbc.co.uk/proms)
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