Prom 59: Schiff/Gewandhausorchester/ Blomstedt, Royal Albert Hall, review: 'Immaculately detailed and powerfully propulsive'

Herbert Blomstedt conducts the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig at the BBC Proms 2016. (BBC/Chris Christodoulou)

Sir Andras Schiff playing Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto? Of course the hall was packed, yet the excitement of this evening lay in the band accompanying the pianist – the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, under its Honorary Conductor Herbert Blomstedt. This is the longest-established civic symphony orchestra in the world – it played all Beethoven’s symphonies during his lifetime – and Blomstedt, at eighty-nine, is the doyen of his trade: as they launched into the overture Leonore No 2 you could sense something of that history in the nobility of their immaculately detailed and powerfully propulsive sound.

Schiff had chosen to play on the latest model of his beloved Bosendorfer and the sound was admirably clear, but on this occasion he was in relentlessly didactic mode. Every note was fastidiously in place, but the exalted emotion of Beethoven’s great concerto was as though recollected in tranquillity, and his pace during the opening movement was sedate. Blomstedt and his band brought a lovely bloom to the Adagio, but even here Schiff did not bend; his Rondo was patrician rather than playful. One longed for the fire of that 75-year-old teenager Martha Argerich. A beautifully-played encore in the form of a Schubert Impromptu was too little, too late. Thereafter it remained for Blomstedt and co to crown this all-Beethoven evening with a finely-honed Seventh Symphony.