Arvo Pärt has written much austerely beautiful music, but few works are as direct and affecting as his 1977 Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. The Estonian composer, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year, had only just discovered the purity of Britten’s music when the latter died. Pärt’s six-minute tribute pits undulating string scales against the sombre toll of a single bell.
It was a fitting opening to a wide-ranging concert in which the venerable Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was put through its paces by Pärt’s Baltic state compatriot, Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons. Emerging from the most poignant of pianissimos, crisscrossing lines rose and fell before the conductor’s clenched hands wrang the final drop of pathos out of the final chord.
Isabelle Faust was the late replacement for Hilary Hahn in Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, and although she kept one eye on the music to be on the safe side, this was an impressively organic reading of this amiable intermingling of 19th-century Romanticism and tangy folk idioms. Sleek and silvery at the top, and with a fine line in fluid phrasing, she highlighted the music’s shadier woodland tones while bringing a lightness and lift to the sunnier episodes that pepper the rhapsodic opening movement.
Faust is disinclined to showboat. Instead, she discovered a poetic delicacy in the concerto’s flashier corners, with Nelsons and his Gewandhaus players her willing and sensitive partners. The central adagio was warmly spun, while in the finale – a spirited Czech furiant – her filigree fingerwork flickered like mercury over the orchestra’s earthier stomp.
Nelsons was generally a surefooted guide to Sibelius’s Second Symphony, though occasionally the music betrayed its fragmentary nature. Well-paced, if a little too loud too soon, he teased out plenty of internal dramatics, ratcheting up the tension in the opening movement. In the ensuing andante, baleful bassoons over a darkly determined pizzicato tread powered the tempest-tossed music towards its implacable conclusion. The whirling scherzo was tense, bracing even, while the conductor’s deftly broadened tempi imbued the long-breathed finale with the necessary weight and nobility.
• Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
