Prom 35

Danish National Symphony Orchestra et al, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Langgaard, Ligeti, Royal Albert Hall, 11 August.

One can't help but like Denmark. I'd know. I've sat next to one of their expatriates at work for several years now and it's never been less than a privilege.
Not everybody in the DNSO is Danish but the award to best Dane on this particular evening went to the principal double bass, presumably from the programme, Michal Stadnicki, unanimously voted by me and my mate as the musician most likely . An enormous and expressive presence who thrilled us throughout Sibelius 5.
However, Henning Kraggerud, soloist in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, is Norwegian and had already set a standard of bravura expression than no mere collective performance like a symphony was ever going to reach. No more than a child, I thought, reading that he was born in 1973 and therefore after the heyday of T. Rex, until I realized that that makes him 37. Like a young Alex Higgins, he looked lingeringly into the eyes of the conductor with such doe-eyed insouciance that was so touching we thought there must be more to it than the concerto at hand.
The list of Romantic violin concerti is a thrill a minute schedule of delight that can be excruciated to any height of passion and intensity and whatever the Bruch, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Sibelius or anything else can do for you, the diminutive Henning wrung all that and more out of the Tchaikovsky. And without being overly demonstrative or flamboyant about it. It never looked like he was showing off, he was apparently playing the concerto in the way he wanted to play it. It was about time I had the thrill down the spine and the tears uninvited back in my eyes caused by just an artistic performance. O, how I missed them while they were away. They are the real judge of whether one is genuinely excited by something or not.
Short choral pieces by Ligeti led into both the Tchaikovsky and the second of the three halves without a break, which meant that the conductor, Thomas Dausgaard, marked the time of attentive silence expertly before we were led into the unexpected curio that turned out to be Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres. Don't be put off by the title. I mean, do be put of by the title. I'm not entirely sure even now. It occasionally seemed much longer than its billed 36 minutes but then in several moments of its ever changing textures, its resource-profligate attitude towards bringing musicians together with organist, sopranos, choirs, piano and harp not contributing all that often, it was blinding, with the four timpanists playing off each other in two magnificent passages as sublime highlights. In some vague way comparable to some of the more listenable 70's progressive rock, like my old favourites Faust and Focus, it had sublimely memorable moments and one was glad to have been introduced to Langgaard without necssaily having to rush out to get the boxed set first thing the next morning.
Most charmingly, the biographical note in the programme explains that Langgaard 'remained an outsider, an obscure figure on the fringes of modern Danish music, regarded at best as a gifted eccentric. But now he is recognised as one of the most important Danish composers of the first half of the 20th century.' I'm not sure how faint praise is allowed to be before it becomes actionable but luckily I was with a highly regarded lawyer who works in that field and I might be asking him to look it up.
We, or at least I, went mainly because it was Sibelius and we love Sibelius and are immediately suspicious of anybody who doesn't in the same way that I used to think it was a bit peculiar if a bloke didn't like football except now that has progressed from the perfectly understandable to the quite laudible and should soon be made law.
The chill passion of the Sibelius leitmotif and Led Zeppelin would have called them riffs is almost unfailingly a great thing but, here, having Henning's act to follow and a few fussy misgivings, it almost failed.
I did wonder at the time if the bassoon would be given the acclaim of their own ovation and I also wondered if some passages were a fraction faster than I liked because, of course, I'm one of the top 30 world experts on Sibelius tempi and expect to be able to get lost in the wilderness they create. My private suspicions were confirmed when my learned friend, whose experience of orchestral music has long since overtaken mine, expressed further doubts about the brass.
It might have been better. My reaction to the Tchaikovsky was that I had been wrong to choose to go to Proms featuring Tallis and Monteverdi previously because I could go and hear the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Portsmouth every month in winter if I wanted and I usually don't. I felt silly and sorry for thinking that after Henning but after Sibelius, the virtuoso double bass apart, I went back to thinking I was right all along. But the end is good and the acoustics of the Albert Hall were shown off to great effect with the echoes of the final hammer blows and it was neither the first time nor will it be the last that the later part of a show was overshadowed by something that came before it.
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