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Fiona Maddocks's rating
Reader rating
Description: Peter Eotvos conducts the UK premiere of his violin concerto, Seven, and works by Debussy, Vaughan Williams and Ravel.
Phone: 0207589 8212
Website: www.royalalberthall.com
Trains: Tube: High Street Kensington 
, Tube / Bus: 9, 10, 52, 360 
Extra info: Food, Pub
As his new Glyndebourne opera, Love and Other Demons, so vividly demonstrated, Peter Eötvös has a blistering talent for orchestral colour. The Hungarian composer should have been at the Proms directing the UK premiere of Seven, his violin concerto commemorating the Columbia space shuttle astronauts who died in 2003. But illness prevented him and the fast-rising Finnish conductor, Susanna Mälkki, stepped in at short notice, drawing playing of flair and subtlety from the Philharmonia.
Eötvös’s two-movement elegy, with soloist Akiko Suwanai, launches straight in on high, with stratospheric violin textures offset by ensemble sounds so tantalising you have to scrutinise each player to work out how the effect is made. Since a keyboard sampler forms part of the mix, you often remain merely bewitched and bewildered.
Creating an unsettling impact, six violinists were positioned around the Albert Hall, their solo voices speaking in signal and response to Suwanai, who continued her journey of poetic rhapsody alone on stage. The sense of figures lost in space was only too vivid, and expertly performed by all.
Suwanai then brought her fluid, seemingly weightless playing to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. Judging by the large audience this season, Proms director Roger Wright is proving himself an ingenious programme maker. Whether the words “Classic FM” are ever said aloud within the walls of Radio 3 is doubtful, but it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that The Lark Ascending heads that other station’s Hall of Fame list. To programme this glorious piece of English pastoral next to the Eötvös premiere was nifty, to say the least.
Yet as this RVW centenary has reminded us, this extraordinary composer’s music stretches far beyond the shores of Albion. He studied with Ravel, whose song-cycle Shéhérezade — with Sarah Connolly the opulent soloist — and ballet Daphnis et Chloé (Suite No 2) were included in this increasingly voluptuous Prom, which had opened with the ultimate in French languor, Debussy’s L’après midi d’un faune.
After all this hot eroticism and exoticism, you felt quite in need of a plunge in cold water. Fortunately the Late Night Prom provided this in the form of John Tavener’s The Whale —first performed in 1968 by the same performers, the London Sinfonietta forces. For a work long regarded as a white elephant, it came up spouting freshly and very much its own inimitable mammal.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
