BBC Proms: Jansen, Philadelphia Orchestra, Dutoit

After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, the Philadelphia Orchestra seemed poised to be the flagship cultural casualty of the financial crisis. Five months on and the bills continue to rise, but in the best Titanic tradition the band are determinedly playing on. It’s been five years since we last heard them at the Proms and their return last night under Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit saw a capacity crowd turn out to show their support and to hear the glossy music-making for which this orchestra is so justly celebrated.

For a partnership so synonymous with French repertoire, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Proms programme seemed disappointingly light on Gallic offerings. Ravel’s “apotheosis of the waltz” La valse offered the only scheduled excursion into the colouristic world that Dutoit has made so much his own. But a short podium speech from the conductor reminded us of London’s affection (as well as Dutoit’s own) for the music of Berlioz, and promised us an encore in the form of the Hungarian March from his Damnation of Faust.

With Terry Gilliam’s recent wartime visuals for ENO still fresh in the mind, this piece of worldly musical cynicism felt even more logical as a postscript to the Ravel – a rictus grin and a shout of ignorant triumph in the face of death and societal decay. Dutoit’s woodwind minced and fluttered with complacent disregard for the threat lurking in cymbals and brass, and we grew from cheery march to something altogether more sinister with such gradual tread that the discovery of our arrival was painful indeed.

The Ravel itself, a Viennese ballroom seemingly remembered from a trench on the Western Front, brought out the best from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brass section. Strangely lacking in sheen during the Sibelius, missing that gilded, sacred glow that great performances of Finlandia can generate, it was here that they abandoned their matter-of-fact efficiency and gave us something altogether more allusive.

Dutoit (pictured right) may not be the kind of conductor to get his hands dirty at the business end of the action, but there’s a lot to be said for his relationship with this orchestra, who gamely take up interpretative responsibility at the point where he relinquishes it. The corporate effort here yielded a swaying balance of strings (whose heady blend never obscured the solo woodwind contributions) that grew into an ever more bewildering montage of musical images.

While Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances stayed just the right side of Ben Hur, sleek but never smug in their cinematic excess, it was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto that everyone had come to hear. Janine Jansen (pictured below), relegating recent Proms memories of Mutter, Midori, Shaham, even Tetzlaff into the slightly foggy middle distance, brought such presence and melodic focus that even the never-quite-silent Proms crowd seemed to catch the stillness at the heart of her technical whirlwind.

Hers is a very finished sound – the match of the highly polished Philadelphia Orchestra string section – and even in the folkier passages of the Moderato assai there was nothing left to expressive chance. It’s a technique so supreme as to suffer occasionally in the recording studio where her personality can get lost beneath its shield, but here in the Royal Albert Hall she drew us all to her with the fragility of her Canzonetta which never took its hand from the melodic rope through the labyrinth, turning the whole movement into a single cantilena of ever-unfolding sound.

I can’t think of a more appropriate orchestra to appear as the Proms’ final visiting ensemble before John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir and then the BBC Symphony Orchestra round off this year’s Proms. In bidding farewell to the 2011 festival season we look ahead to another year of cuts and crises in the arts, to still more difficult decisions and impossible sacrifices. The Philadelphia Orchestra are both a cautionary tale and a source of hope – a reminder of the very real threats the classical world faces, but also of the generous musicianship (and, let us not forget, philanthropy) that will not let itself be extinguished even in the face of such challenges.

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