Sometimes the simple tactics work best. It turns out that if you name a Prom after one of the best-loved works in the classical canon, you don’t just get a full house for that piece, but also a near-capacity Royal Albert Hall after the interval for Witold Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra. Vivid, gritty, bracing: what the programme hails as the 20th-century Polish composer’s “most successful large-scale work” is many things, but it certainly isn’t classical easy listening. And perhaps some of those drawn by the ultra-familiar will now have been set on a voyage of discovery.
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 needn’t be easy listening either, of course, even if its association with Brief Encounter sealed its status as the last word in impassioned pianism. It’s a strange work, full of delicately balanced orchestral textures and vital dialogues between orchestra and soloist. But not in this performance, which was largely driven by Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko, making his Proms debut. After a thrilling crescendo in his opening chords, there was rubato galore (dragging the BBC National Orchestra of Wales forward or holding them back) but minimal subtlety of expression or dynamics. All the notes were there – and many in the hall were clearly delighted to hear them – but with little magic from either Kholodenko or BBCNOW, whose playing lacked the finesse demanded by Rachmaninov’s score beyond the biggest of the big tunes.
The orchestra fared better in Lutosławski’s colourful shifts of timbre and mood. In his final appearance as BBCNOW’s conductor laureate after a nearly 40-year association with the orchestra, Tadaaki Otaka commanded both massive, muscular interjections and passages of hushed, finicky counterpoint that stilled the audience, inviting attention. The orchestra continued to sound most comfortable in the loudest tutti passages, where brass was served in lurid splashes.
The closest this concert got to genuine subtlety was in its opening piece, the Concerto for String Orchestra by Lutosławski’s Polish contemporary Grażyna Bacewicz. There BBCNOW’s XL string section produced a rich, generous sound (carefully blended, bowing as one), folk idioms occasionally breaking playfully through Bacewicz’s mid-century musical nattiness – all led with energetic precision by Otaka.
• Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
