In this most surreal of summers – rain, diamond jubilee, Olympics, Paralympics, economic calamity, more rain – no one could predict whether the BBC Proms would triumph or stagger. In the final hours of the eight-week season, statistics were released like joyful helium balloons: 100,000 tickets sold on the first day of sales, 11 million watching on TV excluding the Last Night, 93% box office (only narrowly missing last year's high of 94%) and perhaps most remarkable, though it may sound modest, 3,000 turning up for an organ recital. An organ recital! True it was Cameron Carpenter, famous for his leather and chains as much as his pipes. "Pull down your praestants!" as the Organ Forum website put it, referring to nothing more suggestive than an organ stop.
The final week, traditionally the time when the world's top ensembles descend, has all the excitement of a home straight, played out not over record-breaking minutes or seconds but in the prolonged intensity of some of the greatest orchestral monoliths: in the past eight days, Brahms's Second Piano Concerto played with heroic ardour and authority by the Berlin Philharmonic and soloist Yefim Bronfman, conducted by Simon Rattle (heard on Radio 3); Mahler's Sixth in an incandescent account by Riccardo Chailly and his Leipzig Gewandhaus, who also explored silence, decay, racket and resurrection in Messiaen's monumental Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. The week ended with the heady twin peaks of Bruckner's Ninth and Strauss's Alpine Symphony from the Vienna Philharmonic and Bernard Haitink, a sober prelude to the Last Night party.
This great swathe of old Europe was punctuated by the New World, though not in this case Dvorák's eponymous symphony. The St Louis Symphony Orchestra made an impressive and thoroughly engaging Proms debut on Tuesday, followed on Wednesday by John Adams's Nixon in China. Conducted by the modest composer himself, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Singers and top soloists, this 1987 masterpiece thrilled a packed Albert Hall in a semi-staging which gave full rein to the score's orchestral invention, sometimes almost overlooked in the theatre with so much else to distract one's attention.
In an outstanding performance, marred only by some rogue amplification which, from the side stalls, frequently sounded off-mic, a fresh cast proved that they, too, could recreate those iconic makers of the modern world, fast fading into history. Gerald Finley, an Adams singer of choice – indeed anyone's singer of choice – captured the gentle world-weariness of Chou En-Lai, with Alan Oke a petulant Mao, James Rutherford comical as Kissinger and Jessica Rivera bewildered and well-meaning as Pat Nixon. Kathleen Kim, with perfect coloratura, electrified the hall as scary Madame Mao. Robert Orth (Nixon) had his own version of sleazy, cheesy bonhomie every bit as convincing as James Maddalena, who for so long had seemed irreplaceable in the role. Time for a fresh staging, preferably – somehow – with the BBCSO in the pit?
The St Louis, America's second oldest orchestra, established the stars-and-stripes mood the night before. This illustrious band, with exuberant but never bombastic brass and supple, well-drilled strings, and their chief conductor David Robertson played a mixed programme which formed a satisfying arc, from the urgency of Brahms's Tragic Overture to the big-band nuances of Gershwin's An American in Paris via Schoenberg. In response to thunderous applause, the encore was Bernstein's overture to Candide – so riotously catchy it will play away merrily on the brain for weeks, ensuring the St Louis players are not quickly forgotten.
The central work was Beethoven's Violin Concerto, in which the inquisitive soloist was Christian Tetzlaff. His seriousness and asceticism, offset by insouciance, elegance and humour, result in music-making of formidable intimacy: could everyone in the Albert Hall hear his exquisite, hushed playing which seemed to defy nature? I hope so. He went wild with the first-movement cadenzas, making his own arrangement of – concentrate here – Beethoven's own in an 1806 arrangement of the Violin Concerto as a piano concerto. In the closing moments of the Rondo finale, Tetzlaff exploded from pianissimo, elfin dance to volcanic outburst in a matter of seconds.
The work was the subject of last week's Soul Music on Radio 4. Tetzlaff, among the contributors, spoke of playing it as if telling a magical story over and over again. A woman recalled her violinist father still fingering the solo part in his final years suffering from Alzheimer's. A monk described how, as a novice, he chose a recording as a gift to himself on leaving the outside world. "[The Beethoven Violin Concerto] led me to the gates of heaven and left me there," he recalled. No vow of silence is needed, except perhaps for the music's duration, to understand what he meant.
