BBC Proms review — Missy Mazzoli’s spells make the orchestra dance

Sunday at the Proms brought the European premiere of a new violin concerto, Procession, by the American composer Missy Mazzoli. Monday brought the British premiere of a three-part orchestral work, Time Flies, by British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. What the two works had in common was narrative intention. Did the music in performance convey this in the programme?

Mazzoli’s concerto, played by the violinist Jennifer Koh with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, is in five parts, casting the soloist “as a soothsayer, sorcerer, healer and pied piper-type character, leading the orchestra through five interconnected healing spells”. Much of this was vividly apparent. The score made striking, magical contrasts between spectral highest notes and lowest depth-charges, with surging portamenti between the two extremes.

Keen, darting dance rhythms and a range of orchestral colours distinguished “St Vitus”, the second section, but the whole score was so theatrically atmospheric that I could easily imagine it becoming ballet music. The final three sections, however, merged into one: though I was happy listening, the programme had encouraged us to hear them as “O My Soul”, “Bone to Bone, Blood to Blood”, and “Procession Ascending”: I’m not sure many listeners would have known which was which.

Mazzoli’s Procession was sandwiched between excerpts from two of the best-known of all ballets: seven items from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, 11 from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. I’ve heard both of these hundreds of times, but Rouvali’s conducting rekindled my delight in them, with gorgeously sensuous playing from the Philharmonia. He plays fabulous games with tempo: a sudden pause, brilliant accelerations and decelerations. These would trip up any unprepared ballet company, and yet the exceptional vigour of these performances is the lifeblood of theatre.

Turnage’s Time Flies — a co-commission with Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and NDR Elbphilharmonie — opened the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s concert on Monday; Sakari Oramo conducted. It employs large numbers: the brass and percussion sections were unusually capacious.

The three movements are named “London Time”, “Hamburg Time,” and “Tokyo Time”. “London” was ebullient, throwing a short rhythmic motif around the players, energetic even when growing quietly intimate. “Hamburg”, where the brass were pre-eminent, featured marvellously dark fanfares but, later, some flute sequences evocative of Aaron Copland. “Tokyo”, surprisingly, abounded with the jazziness that most of us associate with various American cities and, though this was a return to ebullience, the Bernstein-like sound brought the work nearest to cliché.

How interesting to watch and hear two Finnish maestri on consecutive nights, both unalike in gesture and looks, both superb. Oramo was conducting the BBC Symphony in a triple bill of English music: as well as the Turnage, there was Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto (1954) and Elgar’s First Symphony (1907-08). The unfamiliar tuba concerto, with marvellous cadenzas in each movement, was a joy, a work that extends our idea of the composer and the instrument. This is the tuba as luscious, melodious and sportive, capable of coloratura display as well as elemental depths. The soloist was Constantin Hartwig, calmly happy and authoritative.

Oramo paced the Elgar symphony as both architecture and stream of consciousness. It moved, beautifully, between timelessness and being of its Edwardian time. Every return to the slowly treading opening theme came as a serene epiphany, until timelessness and the passage of time became a single perception.

★★★★☆

bbc.co.uk/proms