The BBC's main 60th-birthday tribute to Oliver Knussen comes later in the year, when a weekend at the Barbican is devoted to his music. But the Proms is marking the milestone, too, by programming two of his symphonies. Knussen will include the Third in his appearance with the BBC Symphony in three weeks' time; the Second was the main work in the first hall of Gianandrea Noseda's concert with the BBC Philharmonic.
Composed when Knussen was 18, the Second Symphony is an exploration of sleep and the imagery of dreams. It superimposes settings for soprano of four poems, three of them by the German expressionist Georg Trakl, the fourth by Sylvia Plath, on the formal outline of a four-movement symphony. The vocal lines are often stratospherically high (Gillian Keith was the effortless soloist here) floating above orchestral textures that are by turns intricately hyperactive and beguilingly becalmed; the scoring is light – a smaller orchestra than Noseda had used for the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni that opened the concert – and the effect is of transience, of fleeting, fragile beauty that always remains just out of reach.
Noseda then moved on to another night piece, Mahler's Seventh Symphony, and whatever is dark and ambiguous about this strange, intriguing work was ironed out of his glossy, high definition performance. The Seventh is a work of troubling extremes, of excessive high spirits and sardonic edginess, but aided and abetted by the BBC Philharmonic, reunited with their former music director, it was turned into a gaudy parade of images. There was nothing menacing about the famous tenor horn solo that launches the first movement, no bittersweet nostalgia in its central interlude and nothing except schmaltz in the two Nachtmusik movements. The last movement offered more of the same, with no attempt to find the key to Mahler's most problematic finale.
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