Norrington is playing to the crowd

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Norrington's penchant for turning his back on his players in Haydn's Cello Concerto No1 in C major probably owed less to historical practice than to a desire to beguile the audience. With his now-habitual minimal gestures coaxing a delectably laid-back accompaniment for Jean-Guihen Queyras's equally soigné reading, there was little cause for complaint.

In Rossini's William Tell Overture, as the cantering final section got under way, Norrington looked over his shoulder as though to encourage the Prommers to indulge in Last Night party antics - an invitation they commendably resisted.

Again no harm was done, but Elgar's Symphony No1 is a very different matter. Here Norrington's whim of welcoming applause between movements, on the dubious grounds of historical practice, had disastrous consequences when the rapt atmosphere at the conclusion of the Adagio was shattered. The tentative, tremulous opening of the finale is evidence enough of the continuity of Elgar's conception.

Worse still, Norrington followed the symphony with a vacuous crowd-pleaser that was utterly out of place. Is it not condescending to assume that a Proms audience has to be sent away whistling a merry tune rather than being spiritually uplifted?

Not that the uplift was all it might have been: in the Elgar, Norrington's laid-back approach was much less appropriate. Too often there was a sense of motions being gone through, of insufficient engagement. A generalised melancholy is no substitute for the anguish and nobility with which the work is saturated.

The Stuttgarters have a decent grasp of the Elgarian idiom and negotiated the textural intricacies with admirable facility. There were some lovely wistful phrases from cellos and woodwind, and a wonderfully sustained cadence from the solo clarinet at the end of the Adagio. Only a pity it was ruined by that crass exhortation to audience participation.

www.bbc.co.uk/proms.

BBC Proms: Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra/Norrington
Royal Albert Hall
Kensington Gore, SW7 2AP