From sewers to Christmas trees, we owe a lot to the Victorians. But music has always been a moot point, the dearth of great homegrown composers obscuring 19th-century Britain’s energetic musical life. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were arguably the period’s most famous music lovers, though, so this prom celebrating the 200th anniversary of their births had plenty of material with which to tackle the old “land without music” epithet.
Arthur Sullivan’s Victoria and Merrie England suite was not a promising start. Written for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee celebrations, this is blandly jaunty stuff. Even Ádám Fischer’s sprightly conducting of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment couldn’t prevent it being dangerously tasteful.
Ditto the five songs by Prince Albert that opened the second half. Alessandro Fisher eked what lyricism he could out of unmemorable vocal lines, his light tenor mellow and enviably even-toned; Stephen Hough’s treatment of the endless Alberti bass accompaniments was minutely sensitive. So far, so low-octane.
Mercifully, the rest – a tribute to Victoria and Albert’s energetic promotion of continental European music – was superlative. Playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No 1 on Victoria’s own 1856 gold-leaf Erard grand, Hough relished the instrument’s pronounced strike and varied patina across the keyboard. He wove delicate skeins of melody in the slow movement and unfurled the finale’s handfuls of notes with fuss-free finesse, the piano’s desiccated tone always illuminated by the OAE’s riot of orchestral colour.
Mendelssohn’s Symphony No 3, similarly, was a performance in HD: horn rasps, wonderfully turgid double bass pizzicatos, tiny shivers of pianissimo strings. Fischer’s extraordinary clarity of ensemble allowed for subtle adjustments of tempo, making the performance as a whole irrepressibly, boisterously musical.
