Hot on the heels of the National Youth Orchestra’s Prom, here was another outstanding student ensemble: an orchestra recruited half-and-half from London’s Royal Academy of Music and New York’s Juilliard School, brought together by an exchange scheme funded by the RAM alumnus Elton John. Esa-Pekka Salonen took no prisoners as he whipped the players through three great 20th-century works.
They tore smartly into the start of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, an exacting work requiring pinpoint-precise playing, which it mostly received. It felt as though Salonen was working hard to maintain that precision, though, and the performance didn’t quite achieve the buoyancy that would have let the music dance. Here and elsewhere in the programme, some of the music’s bright colours felt a little muted. Perhaps, for all Salonen’s guidance, this is one area in which there is no substitute for years of experience – in the ability to play to a venue and, for the wind and brass principals in particular, to fill a hall of this size not only with the instrument’s sound but with its character.
The slow waltz in the first movement of Berg’s Violin Concerto had its own momentum thanks partly to the rapport between the orchestra and Vilde Frang, who made the solo violin’s orations sing seamlessly, occasionally harshening her tone to soulful effect. The second movement’s clarinet chorale was played with touching softness and simplicity. Frang then led the strings, section by section, into the climactic elegy, slowly turning 360 degrees to face each player as she did so: one soloist morphing, movingly, into a whole body.
There was more electrifyingly soft playing at the start of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, the string tremolos little more than a disturbance in the air. This work was where the orchestra turned the dial up and came into its own: the strings full-bodied, the wind characterful, especially in the little duets of the second movement, the brass and percussion dynamic. The encore was the Galop from Stravinsky’s Suite No 2, and it was as if this tongue-in-cheek piece finally gave the players permission to let rip – to find the larger-than-life character lacking earlier on.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.
