How did they do it? This was another Prom which looked almost too much on paper but worked hair-raisingly well in practice. It was a Vladimir Jurowski special: whizzing, clamorous demons versus introspective reveries, church bells bringing one witches' sabbath to an end, alarm bells kicking off another. And from the first rapid crescendo of the Musorgsky-Rimsky Korsakov Night on a Bare Mountain to the truly great Julia Fischer's much slower build of a cadenza in Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto and on to the final wind-up of Prokofiev's hellish Third Symphony, the performers held nearly everyone in yet another full house spellbound.
Sometimes Jurowski is so far ahead of the game that I can't always quite work out what he's up to. The Prokofiev Third is hardly core repertoire, yet I thought I knew it well enough. I felt wrong-footed to be hearing it almost as a new piece here, its seething, infernal middle-range textures ruthlessly exposed, the incantatory builds disconcertingly volatile and leading to climaxes that were mostly light and fleet rather than thick with smoke.
Prokofiev later claimed that his symphony should be heard as detached from its original context, his horrifying opera The Fiery Angel based on a novel by Valery Bryusov about demonic possession (or not) in Renaissance Cologne; but it comes ready packaged with the same textural devils buzzing around its memorable themes. There was a touch of detachment from its purely vocal qualities, and one rather bizarre, slightly incoherent final speeding to the ultimate thrash of the short, shocking finale: not quite hellfire, but something different and almost as compelling. Audience members looked at each other in astonishment at the scherzo's spirit-raising of skeetering, slithering 13-part strings before brass announced Satan's high noon and Jurowski swept straight on to the last midnight.
We can't say we hadn't been warned, and warmed up, not to say overheated, at the start. Jurowski made the best possible argument for the wild coherence of Rimsky-Korsakov's improvements to Musorgsky's original Night on a Bare Mountain. And improvements, for once, they are: how often, especially at the Proms, have we been served up the rambling, relatively disappointing original. Jurowski brought some of Musorgsky's own, raw sounds to the glittering arrangement - not least the thudding bass drum of the first stomp - and leapt tempo-wise between rituals with controlled panache. Full marks to LPO clarinettist Robert Hill and flautist Jaime Martin for making the release from hell so convincing, and paving the way for the woodwind's eerier solos in the Prokofiev. In that half of the concert, Jurowski found another predecessor I forget whenever I hear The Fiery Angel: Scriabin, whose demons lurked in another purposefully unstable reading, this time of the four-minute Reverie.
As the maestro himself seemed humbly and warmly to acknowledge, though, the greatness of the evening truly belonged to Julia Fischer, the soloist in Shostakovich's massive First Violin Concerto - a symphony-concerto in all but name. I've now heard three extraordinary violinists in less than a week at the Proms, all of them giving memorable encores - after Kavakos and Kraggerud, Fischer treated us to the diabolism of Ysaÿe, whose First Sonata she features in full at this lunchtime's Prom - and last night's took the palm.
It was a former master of the Shostakovich concerto, David Oistrakh, who compared its opening movement to a Shakespearean soliloquy. Accordingly he played the best Hamlet, but so too did Fischer last night - the violin equivalent of Kathryn Hunter's best of all possible Lears. Working with well-projected orchestral colours and forthright speeds that prevented the slow opening Nocturne and central Passacaglia from sinking into grey or sentimental murk, she kept her head high against the demons of depression or aggressive banality, always commanding rather than succumbing to the infernal dances of scherzo and finale.
And, oh, those majestic, remote fanfares she proudly conjured at the start of the most probing cadenza in the repertoire: how hauntingly they flew into the spaces of the vast hall. A soloist who draws you in always creates more magic in this venue than an orchestra at full pelt reaching out, and if there's one special sound I'll take away with me from this year's Proms, it will probably be that celestial violin-trumpeting.
Prokofiev later claimed that his symphony should be heard as detached from its original context, his horrifying opera The Fiery Angel based on a novel by Valery Bryusov about demonic possession (or not) in Renaissance Cologne; but it comes ready packaged with the same textural devils buzzing around its memorable themes. There was a touch of detachment from its purely vocal qualities, and one rather bizarre, slightly incoherent final speeding to the ultimate thrash of the short, shocking finale: not quite hellfire, but something different and almost as compelling. Audience members looked at each other in astonishment at the scherzo's spirit-raising of skeetering, slithering 13-part strings before brass announced Satan's high noon and Jurowski swept straight on to the last midnight.
We can't say we hadn't been warned, and warmed up, not to say overheated, at the start. Jurowski made the best possible argument for the wild coherence of Rimsky-Korsakov's improvements to Musorgsky's original Night on a Bare Mountain. And improvements, for once, they are: how often, especially at the Proms, have we been served up the rambling, relatively disappointing original. Jurowski brought some of Musorgsky's own, raw sounds to the glittering arrangement - not least the thudding bass drum of the first stomp - and leapt tempo-wise between rituals with controlled panache. Full marks to LPO clarinettist Robert Hill and flautist Jaime Martin for making the release from hell so convincing, and paving the way for the woodwind's eerier solos in the Prokofiev. In that half of the concert, Jurowski found another predecessor I forget whenever I hear The Fiery Angel: Scriabin, whose demons lurked in another purposefully unstable reading, this time of the four-minute Reverie.
As the maestro himself seemed humbly and warmly to acknowledge, though, the greatness of the evening truly belonged to Julia Fischer, the soloist in Shostakovich's massive First Violin Concerto - a symphony-concerto in all but name. I've now heard three extraordinary violinists in less than a week at the Proms, all of them giving memorable encores - after Kavakos and Kraggerud, Fischer treated us to the diabolism of Ysaÿe, whose First Sonata she features in full at this lunchtime's Prom - and last night's took the palm.
It was a former master of the Shostakovich concerto, David Oistrakh, who compared its opening movement to a Shakespearean soliloquy. Accordingly he played the best Hamlet, but so too did Fischer last night - the violin equivalent of Kathryn Hunter's best of all possible Lears. Working with well-projected orchestral colours and forthright speeds that prevented the slow opening Nocturne and central Passacaglia from sinking into grey or sentimental murk, she kept her head high against the demons of depression or aggressive banality, always commanding rather than succumbing to the infernal dances of scherzo and finale.
And, oh, those majestic, remote fanfares she proudly conjured at the start of the most probing cadenza in the repertoire: how hauntingly they flew into the spaces of the vast hall. A soloist who draws you in always creates more magic in this venue than an orchestra at full pelt reaching out, and if there's one special sound I'll take away with me from this year's Proms, it will probably be that celestial violin-trumpeting.
- Full listings for the 2010 BBC Proms
- Listen to this concert for the next six days on the BBC iPlayer
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