After the BBC Symphony Orchestra's current chief conductor, Jiří Bělohlávek, withdrew from this Prom due to health reasons, they were lucky to secure the services of his already designated successor Sakari Oramo who took over the programme unchanged.
It's early days, but it looks as if Oramo has quickly achieved an easy rapport with the players. Together, they made the best possible case for the works they performed, including a premiere and Prokofiev's sixth symphony. The new piece was Endless Forms – a quotation from the final sentence of Darwin's Origin of Species – by Fung Lam, born in Hong Kong in 1979. Consisting of a sequence of relatively simple harmonic gestures shared between different orchestral groupings, the piece does not add up to a great deal over its nine-minute span, other than floating a series of attractively scored, largely contemplative ideas, but it received a clean and focused performance that gave it its best shot.
Prokofiev's Sixth formed the second half. Unveiled in 1947, it has never achieved a fraction of the popularity of its immediate predecessor, which is usually regarded as his best work in the form, and its treatment of ideas of mixed quality – some genuinely striking, others sounding curiously half-formed – scarcely feels truly symphonic in intent. But Oramo held it together remarkably, giving it a sense of impetus and coherence that proved surprisingly persuasive.
He was equally successful in accompanying Kirill Gerstein's understated account of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. The Russian pianist's technique is fully equal to the piece's challenges, and his sense of discrimination made a welcome change from pure showmanship. Even so, there are moments in the concerto where flaunting Rachmaninov's material is no bad thing, and he was inclined to hold back a little too much.
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