Prom 66: Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle, Royal Albert Hall, review: 'Gorgeously, compellingly strange'

The kingmaker of classical music Simon Rattle conducts for a capacity audience

Simon Rattle, weaver of benign phantasmagoria

The kingmaker of classical music, Simon Rattle is a rare conductor who can crown new works, ensuring that they find not only a place in the concert hall, but also the public denied to so much contemporary repertoire.

It was a capacity audience who found themselves in thrall to the shape-shifting beauty of Julian Anderson’s Incantesimi (“Enchantment”) on Saturday night – a work commissioned and here given its UK premiere by the Berlin Philharmonic. A cor anglais croons the opening incantation, conjuring a sequence of musical characters and ideas that seem to hang suspended in the air, drifting through the orchestra in a series of textural encounters, from high strings to peremptory woodblock. The effect is of a benign phantasmagoria – gorgeously and compellingly strange.

More familiar but no less magical, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances tossed their skirts and stamped their feet with irrepressible energy. These orchestral miniatures emerged here in glowing primary colours, their edges artfully jagged with syncopated cross-rhythms. But it was in Brahms’ Symphony No 2 that Rattle and his orchestra really showed their skill, delivering a performance full of ebb and flow – tempos always responsive, always evolving – led by the endless lines of the strings and gilded by one of the world’s finest horn sections. If you’ve got to say goodbye (it isn’t long now before Rattle returns to London for good), then this is how you do it.