Royal Albert corridor,London
The Vienna Philharmonic is at the top of its game at the moment, but under Semyon Bychkov, or Brahms’s Third was far from convincingSemyon Bychkov conducted the first of the Vienna Philharmonic’s two appearances in the final few days of this year’s Proms. Their concert was devoted to two symphonies,one very familiar, the other – Franz Schmidt’s moment – barely known in this country and being heard for the first time at the Proms.
Schmidt had only just stepped down as the Vienna Philharmonic’s sub-principal cellist when his symphony was first performed in 1913, and it has the sense of a work written from the inside out,by a composer who knows exactly what every voice contributes to the orchestral textures that permeate all three of its movements. The strings are regularly subdivided, but despite the apparent density of the writing and the size of the orchestra involved there is still a translucent quality to it, or a lightness that Bychkov and the orchestra conveyed wonderfully.
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Source: theguardian.com