Martyn Brabbins’ concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was his second appearance with them at the Proms this summer. As he told the audience in a brief speech before he ended the concert with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, he should not have been there at all, for it should have been conducted by Andrew Davis, who died very soon after the season was announced. The evening became a tribute to Davis, one of the most admired of British conductors, who was the BBCSO’s chief conductor for 11 years and very much came to embody the Proms, especially with his speeches on the Last Night.
The Elgar and the Ritual Dances from Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage, as radiant and rhapsodic as ever, were brought into the concert to reflect Davis’s love of British music. The first half, however, remained unchanged. Brabbins began with a fierce, almost caustic account of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, before the first UK performance of a BBC co-commission, Steve Reich’s Jacob’s Ladder. Like his Traveler’s Prayer, first heard in London in 2021, it was composed during the pandemic, and like that work it is a setting of Hebrew texts from the Old Testament, in this case four verses from Genesis in which Jacob dreams of a ladder to heaven.
A small ensemble of strings and woodwind partnered the two sopranos and two tenors, members of Synergy Vocals. The singers delivered the text, but for much of the time it was the instruments that dominated proceedings. They were anchored by the pulsing of a vibraphone, yet the textures remained buoyant and bright, with just occasional flashes of something darker; it was Reich at his most joyous and serene.
The following afternoon, another full house was held rapt by a programme of chamber music, as Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma played piano trios by Brahms and Beethoven in Prom 54. There’s no use pretending that the Albert Hall is an ideal venue for such a programme; for anyone sitting in the stalls at eight o’clock to the platform, the balance between the three players was problematic, with Ma’s cello often inaudible and Ax’s selfless piano playing only intermittently coming to the fore.
But it is to the credit of these three outstanding musicians that they never attempted to supersize their playing. Instead, their performances of Brahms’s C major Trio Op 87 and Beethoven’s Archduke Trio Op 97, with the slow movement of Schubert’s B flat Trio added as a seraphic encore, were wonderfully refined and thoughtful. Adapting them to the space would have destroyed their subtlety. This was a memorable concert in entirely the wrong location.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September.
