If you want a full, 5000-strong audience in the Royal Albert Hall, and the second-half work won't sell by itself, insert a popular concerto. It worked so well for Vasily Petrenko and the RPO in a perfect programme earlier in the Proms, and the Elgar Cello Concerto got as mesmerising a performance as Walton's Second Symphony. Jakub Hrůša worked with a fellow Czech he knows well, Lukáš Vondráček, in Rachmaninov's colossal Third Piano Concerto, but though the audience was delighted with the sensitive virtuosity, it didn't flow anything like as well as the Janáček Sinfonietta in the second half.
Bravo, first, to Hrůša's ongoing championship of Vítězslava Kaprálová, who was born like him in Brno but died tragically young in exile at the age of 25, having achieved so much as a composer and conductor. Hrůša conducted her fine graduate work, the Military Sinfonietta, at the 2024 Proms. Suita rustica, its sequel, is a bit more conservative, stitching in the occasional dissonance and rhythmic playfulness to a parade of personally flavoured folk songs (most of the audience would have recognised the Furiant in the middle of the second movement from its incorporation as one of the dances in Smetana's The Bartered Bride). Hrůša gave it full panache and poetry, but it's a straightlaced distance from the model the programme note proposed, Stravinsky's Petrushka, and the work we were to hear in the second half, composed 12 years earlier before the horror of the Nazis engulfed a previously free Czechoslovakia.
Rachmaninov's biggest, most demanding concerto began with Vondráček playing on the cusp of audibility, then speeding through elaboration of the mostly stepwise theme - derived, like so much in Rachmaninov from orthodox chant - so much that the orchestral solos were barely able to articulate it; full credit to them, and Hrůša, for keeping such close tabs. Though all notes were dazzlingly in place, this was an interpretation of fits and starts, cordoning off the romantic theme and only really catching fire in the massive cadenza and its aftermath.
The orchestra, and the trumpets especially, were responsible for the real thrills in the finale, but despite impeccable musicianship, Vondráček didn't make the case for an individual take on the oceanic masterpiece as I've heard from Andsnes and Giltburg in recent interpretations. His encore, Smetana's "The Lancer" from his second book of Czech dances, ran a lovely gamut in terms of expression and dynamics, perhaps closer to his heart.
The sight of nine extra trumpeters in addition to the orchestral three plus two tenor tubas and two bass trumpets is always a thrill, especially ranged at the top of the orchestra in the Albert Hall, and the sound of these 13 was flawlessly expressive in the opening fanfare of Janáček's Sinfonietta.
Hrůša drove them, and then the selective rest of the orchestra, urgently forward, but never too hard; the history of Brno flashed past in vividly animated style, strings swooning romantically in the garden of the Queen's Monastery, woodwind shrieking alarms more vocally than I've ever heard them, the final reunion of brass and full orchestra overwhelmingly exciting.
Special credits to flautist André Cebrián, trombonist Helen Vollam and timpanist Antoine Bedewi for their vivid contributions. This was much more thrilling than the oddly flat sound of massed brass bands in Pappano's LSO performance of the Berlioz Requiem, and up there with the total hit of the season so far, John Wilson's Respighi. In other words, as good as it gets.
