A clarinet solo line carved, firm and fierce, out of the heatwave stuffiness. Twitches and rustles from the huge array of percussion. A bigger picture emerges, anchored by the deep throb of low brass. Bitonal parps cut through like car horns in gridlock.
A century after its premiere, Edgard Varèse’s Intégrales remains a beguiling listen – particularly in a performance as coolly loose-limbed as the BBC Symphony Orchestra served up under Finnish conductor Eva Ollikainen. Standing where the strings would normally be to marshal the piece’s sparse wind, brass and percussion, Ollikainen made angular, hyper-efficient gestures.
That not-for-show approach persisted throughout – with sonically spectacular results – as each item on the programme demanded an incrementally larger orchestra. The UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Before We Fall (Cello Concerto) began with a splash of cymbal and a tutti chord that disintegrated rapidly into tapping and sliding out of which soloist Johannes Moser soared, all generous vibrato and lyrical warmth. As with so many of Thorvaldsdottir’s scores, the concerto has an elemental, immersive quality, its symphonic textures seeming at times to breath as if a living organism. Elsewhere, the orchestra was in danger of swallowing Moser’s detailed passagework whole. Occasionally, the entire ensemble clicked briefly into tonal harmony – a remarkable, luminous effect.
After the interval: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was performed with breathtaking clarity. The coordination was absolutely taut across the now-vast orchestra, the piece’s sudden cut-offs of phrases and ideas brutal, Ollikainen maintaining a knife-edge balance between effortful, friction-heavy string playing and woodwind solos that might hail from another planet. The piece’s tension between the mellow and the murderous, the natural and the machinic, felt genuinely high stakes: this sacrificial dance had serrated edges, every detail terrifying in its lucidity, its momentum intoxicating.
The Rite’s power was only increased by a cool-as-ice performance of Ravel’s Boléro (earworm to end all earworms) at the end of the first half. Ollikainen’s air of detachment came into its own here, holding back the tremendous power of Ravel’s 13-minute crescendo until the very last minute so that the looping melody’s final crash to earth came as a full-on orchestral catastrophe.
• Listen again on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 13 September.
