The 2025 Proms are turning towards the final stretch. That means it’s time for more visiting orchestras. The Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Melbourne Symphony are among this week’s arrivals. But the past weekend belonged to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. No visit by Amsterdam’s finest is to be missed, but these two Proms in less than 24 hours brought something more – the starry presence of Klaus Mäkelä, who becomes the RCO’s chief conductor in 2027 and who currently has the musical world at his feet.
The obvious challenge in judging whether the two will become a perfect fit is that the RCO are simply so good. The warmth and precision of the Amsterdam string sound is legendary, while the RCO offers listeners wind playing to die for. So strong is the squad that, like a top football club, many principals who played in the visit’s first concert of Berio and Mahler were rotated in the second, consisting of Mozart, Prokofiev and Bartók.
But Mäkelä is himself a Galáctico signing and the hall was duly packed. Still only 29, he brought two big works – Mahler’s fifth symphony in the first concert and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra in the second – not forgetting a truly thrilling Kodály encore to close with. The big pieces were fabulously played, of course, but it was the instrumental details rather than the overall conception that made the biggest mark. There was too little sense of symphonic architecture in Mäkelä’s approach to the Mahler, while his Bartók emphasised the work’s showpiece qualities at the expense of the sense of distance and loneliness that haunts the score.
Mahler, though, is in the RCO’s blood. The composer himself conducted this orchestra. Decades later, Bernard Haitink’s Amsterdam Mahler performances became legendary. Mäkelä’s relentless approach had little in common with Haitink’s more measured tread, nor with Mark Elder’s cerebral take on the same symphony in last year’s Proms. From the expertly phrased funeral march trumpet call onwards, wind playing was exceptional, as were quieter passages more generally. The strings caressed the Adagietto’s lingering phrases and Mäkelä brought fine swagger and propulsion to the rondo-finale. As an interpretation, though, it never quite established itself.
Unexpectedly, Luciano Berio’s Rendering, which preceded the Mahler, fared better. This substantial three-movement piece feeds some of Schubert’s late symphonic sketches through Berio’s fertile and ingenious late 20th-century sensibility. The result, especially when it is as well done as it was here, is fresh and exploratory, as Schubertian melodies modulate into Berio’s mysterious fragments and colours. If the test of a good performance is that it stays in the head, then this one did just that.
The same was true of Janine Jansen’s account of Prokofiev’s first violin concerto on the following day. Jansen commanded the performance, her playing technically dazzling and musically intense, with Mäkelä and the RCO providing impeccably unobtrusive accompaniment.
Finally, hats off to Mäkelä for opening the second concert with an elegantly played example of something that has become too much of a Proms rarity in recent years – a Mozart symphony, in this case the D major “Paris”.
• Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
