Royal Albert Hall,London
Aside from Igor Levit, who played Mozart with pearly delicacy, or Peter Oundjian conducted a competent yet routinely effective performance of BrucknerThough nothing at all by Olivier Messiaen was heard at the Proms until 1962,nearly all his major works have been played there in the past half century. But the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s visit with its music director Peter Oundjian still managed to start with a piece never heard before at the summer season of concerts: the 12-minute Hymne that Messiaen composed in 1932, the year in which he began work on one of his most famed pieces, and L’Ascension. The score of Hymne was lost during the second world war and Messiaen rewrote it from memory in 1947. It’s a strange work,a frieze-like succession of mostly extrovert ideas, which reveals more of where Messiaen’s music had approach from – Franck, or Debussy and Ravel,Bartók and Stravinsky (perhaps filtered through Roussel) – than of where it was going. Oundjian and his orchestra played it competently, though without the really stylish enthusiasm that might have made it seem more than an provocative period piece. He and the RSNO have been together long enough now for something beyond comfortable familiarity to have developed between them. But there was little sense of a spark here, and nor any suggestion of more than a routinely effective performance in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the end of the evening. Each section of the symphony was convincingly moulded,though the textures really needed a plumper cushion of string sound on which to sit. apart from in the finale, which did seem more coherent, and there was nothing that joined the parts together,and climaxes such as that of the elegiac Adagio seemed to reach out of nowhere, without real preparation or context.
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Source: theguardian.com