BBC Proms: Grimaud, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Honeck

In a week that sees Proms visits from two major American orchestras, it fell to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to raise the curtain for their blue-blooded “Big Five” colleagues the Philadelphia Orchestra. With Tchaikovsky featuring large in both programmes comparisons are only natural, and it will be interesting to see what response Thursday night offers to an energetic but at times rather unsubtle evening of music from Pennsylvania’s “other” orchestra.

As titles go, Fantastic Appearances of a Theme of Hector Berlioz is a particularly fine one, getting bonus points for sheer self-promoting bravado. Walter Braunfels’ orchestral variations are only outdone for titular chutzpah by the composer’s Don Juan Variations, whose subtitle – A Classic-Romantic Phantasmagoria – was so enticing as to send me straight home to listen to them. Sadly neither work (especially the latter’s soupy reworking of Mozart) quite lives up to its promise, but Manfred Honeck read the Proms well when he decided to programme this curiosity as last night’s concert opener.

Taking the “Song of the Flea” from Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust as his theme, Braunfels subjects it to a series of vivid orchestral variations that take in every mood (so long as it’s emphatic) and every emotion (so long as it’s primary-coloured). At full length the work is some 50 minutes long. Filleted back to a brisk 15 its swaggering charm fills the tricky overture slot nicely, carried along by the impact of its noisy novelty. I’d have loved just a little more cynicism in the opening cornet theme, but the rest of the brass section compensated in the big-bellied, brass-led, militaristic coda in which, if they never quite held hands with the strings, they far outstripped them for characterisation.

In a reprise of her appearance last December with Jurowski and the LPO, Hélène Grimaud joined the orchestra for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4. It was a challenging choice for a pianist whose power is more often in the fire than the still, small voice, and one that didn’t entirely disprove this generalisation.

Despite some of the worst coughing, rustling saboteurs of this year’s festival we did get an opening solo gambit of probing, questing tenderness from Grimaud. This was matched perhaps a little too enthusiastically by the orchestra, whose pianissimos throughout the evening were extreme but insufficiently charged to project their energy out into a hall this size. Yet despite Grimaud’s evident emotion, it was hard from here on to follow her narrative or to marry it with the orchestra’s. She offered us fluid restraint in the Andante but just a little too much steel in her middle-register tone to plausibly calm the orchestral Furies. Her Rondo persistently rejected the playful overtures of the orchestra, never unbending to reveal the sunnier face of the movement they seemed to hope for.

The performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5 seemed to have caught the Braunfels syndrome that was going round; strident at times, Honeck’s (pictured above) compulsively subdivided beat seemed to encourage his orchestra to push the drama of individual passages (the closing phrase for cellos and basses in the Allegro con anima notably) at the expense of the coherence of the whole. Speeds also seemed to suffer, and while the tempo relationships between sections worked well, the overall sense was one of rather unvarying urgency.

Despite a tendency to overstatement there were some beautifully drawn moments here. The muted horns at the opening of the Valse staggered out of the texture like grizzled and inebriated old uncles in Tchaikovsky’s ballroom, before ceding the floor once again to the flitting string lovelies and the dandyish clarinet, flouncing off in a coat-tail flick of descending quavers.

Persuaded into two encores by the enthusiastic crowd, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra clearly delighted their Proms audience, giving them all the blood and thunder they could possibly want. If we’d had just a single piece or movement of contrast among all the fleshy aggression then I’d happily have joined them, but as it was their diet of passion proved too rich to be digested comfortably at a single sitting.

• Listen again to this Prom for the next seven days on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer
• theartsdesk's pick of the Proms
• theartsdesk's BBC Proms 2011 complete listings