The BBC Symphony may be the corporation's flagship orchestra, but that pre-eminence is increasingly threatened by its regional counterparts. Its fortunes have waned while Leonard Slatkin has been chief conductor, and the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Scottish Symphony have prospered; the BBCSSO's two Proms this week with their hugely promising young chief conductor Ilan Volkov showed the strides they have been making together.
Mahler's Seventh Symphony is a challenge for even the most experienced Mahler conductors and orchestras. Making the finale hang together is an art in itself, and if Volkov never quite erased the sense of one episode awkwardly tacked to the next, he did at least make its bombast seem convincing, and a genuine deliverance from the beautifully realised broodings of the earlier movements.
The first half had been more obviously ebullient - Mozart's single-movement Symphony No 32, chipper and graceful under Volkov, and a Janacek rarity. The Eternal Gospel is a quirky 1914 setting of a text based on the Book of Revelation; its main revelation, though, is of Janacek's late operatic style, a decade before The Cunning Little Vixen; John Daszak was the voice of the mystic, Gweneth-Ann Jeffers the angel, and the London Philharmonic Choir supplied the alleluias.
The BBC Symphony so often plays in a lacklustre way, it's a pleasant surprise that under the right conductor it can be a fine orchestra. Standards were certainly higher than usual with Osmo Vänskä. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but there is talk that Vänskä could be the BBCSO's next chief. If that's the case, this concert was hugely encouraging, for he is a conductor of outstanding quality, who imprints real character on everything he tackles. Here, that was Lutoslawski (the late, lissom study Mi-Parti), Szymanowski's Second Violin Concerto (with Leonidas Kavakos as the fabulously lucid soloist) and Sibelius's Second Symphony, which Vänskä invested with a racked and anguished urgency.
