Ethel Smyth’s music options prominently on this 12 months’s Proms, and the centrepiece of the Metropolis of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s live performance with their chief conductor designate, Kazuki Yamada, was her Concerto for Violin and Horn, written in 1927. Reflective in temper and post-Romantic in idiom, it’s a putting, bittersweet work that flanks a meditative central Elegy with two ambiguous allegros that mix wit and brilliance with plunges into nostalgia and remorse.
Getting the piece proper in efficiency might be difficult as the bizarre mixture of devices can lead to issues of stability, with the horn swamping the violin, if the conductor isn’t cautious. Yamada, nonetheless, admirably ensured even-handedness. Elena Urioste (violin) and Ben Goldscheider (horn) had been the soloists, the innate the Aristocracy of his phrasing judiciously offsetting her extra effusive lyricism. The Elegy, by which Smyth develops two parallel melodies in tandem, giving neither prominence, sounded beautiful, and the large, accompanied double cadenza that dominates the finale was finished with partaking flamboyance and appreciable bravado. Yamada, in the meantime, discreetly underscored the just about Italianate heat of Smyth’s orchestration with its rippling harp and wonderful woodwind writing. It was a most beguiling efficiency.
Steadiness could not have been an issue right here, although sarcastically it grew to become a difficulty in Yamada’s oddly heavyweight, raw-round-the-edges account of the overture to Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila: loud, distinguished brass obscured an excessive amount of of the scurrying element within the strings, although the good cello melody that successfully types the second topic had large sweep and elation. Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony got here after the interval, in the meantime, a finely judged efficiency, passionate with out turning sentimental, pressing with out ever seeming rushed. Yamada was keenly alert to each the rating’s natural, constantly evolving thematic construction, and to the turbulence that forces its means every now and then to the floor. The enjoying right here was actually positive, too, fantastically detailed and, on this occasion, properly balanced, the brass heat and clear, a beautiful richness within the strings, and the good clarinet solo that opens the adagio directly deeply felt and totally ravishing.
Obtainable on BBC Sounds till 10 October. The BBC Proms proceed till 10 September.
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