The centrepiece of the BBC Scottish Symphony Prom with Matthias Pintscher, the orchestra's artist-in-association, was the London premiere of his own Chute d'Etoiles, a double trumpet concerto that takes its inspiration from Anselm Kiefer's eponymous 2007 installation Grand Palais in Paris. Pintscher, admirably, thinks big, and Chute d'Etoiles looks grandly at themes of creation and renewal in the aftermath of catastrophe.
The work opens with an almighty orchestral roar, suggestive of some apocalyptic happening, and in the eerie silence that follows, the two trumpeters – Tine Thing Helseth and Marco Blaauw – begin a series of duets and duels that gradually impel the rest of the players back into action. Pintscher's decision to keep the solo lines running in close parallel, rather than concord, results in a complex interplay of performing styles, and Helseth's gentle lyricism is contrasted throughout with Blaauw's spiky assertiveness.
The orchestral textures, meanwhile, are very metallic, a reminder that Kiefer's installation is made predominantly of lead. There are flaws and problems: Pintscher's tendency to linger over his own material means that the work takes an age to exert its grip; and his fondness for extreme dynamics isn't ideally suited to the Albert Hall, where the quietest of the trumpet solos seemed in danger of vanishing into inaudibility.
Pintscher's glamorous orchestral writing owes much to early modernism, and Chute d'Etoiles' companion pieces, tellingly, were Ravel's Rapsodie Espagnole and Stravinsky's Firebird. His conducting style, meanwhile, is to some extent informed by his compositional techniques: there's the same tendency to linger, the same fascination with texture and dynamic extremes. His Rapsodie Espagnole, as a result, was wonderfully slow and erotic, despite protracted inter-movement coughing from the audience. But his Firebird all too frequently sacrificed excitement and tension for sonority and detail. The hushed fairytale landscape in which the narrative unfolds was beautifully evoked, but the violence that threatens to tear it apart was curiously muted and lacking in impact.
