BBC Proms: Barruk, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Kuusisto review - vague incantations, precise laments

Every year, the Royal Albert Hall proves complicit in the magic of the quietest utterances if, as Barenboim put it, you let the audience come to you and don’t try too hard. Pekka Kuusisto is the ultimate communicator, the ideal guide for the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Stitching "classical" string music with numbers from a Sámi singer, Katarina Barruk, though, didn’t quite come off.

Barruk (pictured below) is a striking performer, with her silver dress, her inherited jewellery and the strange, fluid movements she uses to accompany her Sámi joiks, a very specific kind of song. Contrary to the biography, though, hers is not a "powerful voice", rather a soft one, even with the aid of a microphone, that sometimes flies into the stratosphere. Though the words of her five main numbers are not in a language most of us in the audience would know, we still needed to hear more of them to follow the translations in the programme. So-called "world music" always needs a proper context. Barruk's is mostly world pop, falling a bit flat in distinguished company, but the one for the ages here was "Great-Grandmother", a true story Barruk narrated in English before singing it ("Never surrender/You belong to this place/Protect our ancestral homelands" runs the refrain), So this was more an education than a moving experience, at least until Barruk spoke of her awe at being in the Albert Hall. 

The continuity would have worked without applause in between, and after that powerful number, Barruk went offstage for a bit. The choice of string pieces, though, was fine: exquisitely so Tippett's "A Lament" from the Divertimento on Sellinger's Round and above all the still, flowing centre of the first half, Reger's arrangement of Bach's Chorale Prelude "O mensch, bewein dein Sunde gross" – please note, string orchestras, the perfect, profound encore. Hannah Kendall's Werroon Werroon was mere connective tissue; Glass's "Blood Oath" movement from the Third, "Mishima", String Quartet offered a dynamism within the short space that always suits him best. After the interval, Kuusisto and Company were sporting the kilts and suits Maja Ravan had made them for their stunning 90-minute Concert Theatre DSCH. theartsdesk's Rachel Halliburton found this from-memory Shostakovich performance piece transfixing in London; I was lucky to catch its first airing in Oslo, actually the second time I'd experienced the Barshai-arranged Chamber Symphony from the group; the first was at Gothenburg's Point Festival under their equally inspirational previous artistic director Terje Tønnesen, where they segued into it straight from Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. 

The companion-piece this time was Arvo Pärt's Fratres in the version which places solo violin to the fore. Kuusisto took over as shaman, directing the swell to passionate intensity and the fade which allowed for a seamless glide into the desolate opening of the work we properly know as Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet. Theatre survived the context of the DSCH show, second violins passionately dialoguing and then fiercely watching. The plunge into the Allegro molto was more hair-raising than I've ever experienced it, the lone voice of consolation from the forest in the fourth movement – cellist Frida Fredrikke W. Wærvågen – just audible quoting the love of Katerina Izmailova in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Kuusisto capped that with a single figure on the brink of extinction, leading back, more or less, to where we started. And then, after this threnody for our and any time, he offered up piece and love, and strummed against his whistling of "Imagine" as encore (pictured above) The at first spectral humming of the audience, spontaneous, I assume, actually helped to make this another supremely moving moment in a mostly introspective evening. A fascinating contrast to the extrovert celebrations at the previous Prom's Handel Alexander's Feast.

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