A gentle sweep of the arms outwards, an unsettling silence and then the slow bloom of a bottom-heavy minor chord in the strings. More than a century after audiences were taught to fall silent as standard, most concerts continue to begin emphatically, with the musical equivalent of a teacher calling a new reception class to order. But the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s 10th outing this Proms season – this time under composer-conductor Thomas Adès – was an altogether subtler affair.
Sibelius’s tone poem The Swan of Tuonela provided that beguilingly unhurried start. The strings settled, featherlike, into a light, luminous backdrop over which the cor anglais twisted and soared. Reaching forwards and upwards, hands outstretched, Adès held the orchestra as if under a spell: the brass, seeming to float from a great distance, the strings’ eventual unison melody calm and spacious.
The UK premiere of Breathing Forests, an organ concerto by California composer Gabriella Smith burst into life in a colourful splash of tremolo and repetitions, the strings and upper woodwind in near-constant motion while sustained notes from organist James McVinnie and the BBCSO brass provided some sense of larger-scale shape. Amid periodic swathes of Philip Glass-style arpeggios, there were more intriguing details: strange squeals and pitch bends, brashly tonal chords that disintegrated on landing, the glacial creaking of bows pressed into strings, cluster chords as if a toddler had been let loose on the organ manuals. Much of the work was densely orchestrated, Smith generating a kind of ecosystem-in-motion – more persuasive as a vivid soundscape than as a finite structure.
After the interval came two musical responses to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Adès’s own Five Spells from The Tempest ran the gamut from the storm’s seething, noisy swerves and lurches via Ariel’s mercurial, angular woodwind to hints of elegant courtly dances for Ferdinand and Miranda. Sibelius’s The Tempest – Suite No 1 (among his last completed works) featured still more radical switches of atmosphere, between bland folksiness and a remarkably lean, bold modernism. Adès presided like Prospero himself, relentlessly engaging as he conjured evanescent woodwind solos and symphonic textures of fearless, squally aggression.
• Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
