In a Proms season that is marking a significant Vaughan Williams anniversary it was inevitable that a place would have to be found somewhere for what is often claimed to be the nation’s favourite piece of “classical” music. But not many would have predicted that The Lark Ascending would be included in a concert given by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with its principal conductor Nicholas Collon, or that a Finnish violinist, Pekka Kuusisto, would be the soloist.
It had also seemed unlikely in advance that Kuusisto’s performance of the Vaughan Williams would be the highlight of what otherwise turned out to be a disappointing concert. His rather withdrawn, intimate approach, almost an improvisation spun on the slenderest thread of sound, made it seem less rural idyll than elegy, an exercise in nostalgia written at a time when the way of life and the world it hymned was about to disappear in the maelstrom of world war.
There was folksy fiddling and birdsong in the evening’s novelty too, the first British performance of Thomas Adès’s Märchentänze. Originally composed for violin and piano but orchestrated last year, these four “fairytale dances” draw heavily on British folk tunes, which Adès intricately combines and clothes in glowing instrumental colours. The third movement, A Skylark for Jane, was originally written for solo violin but in this version becomes a web of independent birdsongs, not unlike the famous Epode movement from Messiaen’s Chronochromie, while the finale combines fragments of many tunes to virtuoso effect. Altogether it’s a neat showcase for Kuusisto, who added a Sibelius Humoresque as an encore, dedicating it to the memories of his mother and brother, who died earlier this year.
In both of these works the contribution of the orchestra was efficient rather than characterful, and the works with which Collon book-ended the programme, Debussy’s La Mer and Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, were just as unconvincing. Perhaps by its finale the Debussy was beginning to reveal its true colours after the earlier movements had seemed almost tentative, but the symphony never achieved any kind of coherence; its greatest moments – the extraordinary transition of the first movement into a scherzo; the majestic emergence of the “Swan Hymn” in the finale – seemed more underwhelming than one ever thought they could ever be.
Available on BBC Sounds until 10 October. The BBC Proms continue until 10 September.
