Whatever the merits of giving Dvorak such blanket coverage in this year's Proms, there's no doubt his music offers plenty of scope for exploration. His reputation rests essentially on less than a dozen works, and vast tracts of his output remain little known. The Proms is doing its bit to broaden that knowledge: there's already been a concert performance of his opera Dmitrij; the dramatic cantata The Spectre's Bride is due in the Albert Hall next month, and Andrew Davis devoted half of the first of his two concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra this week to the Mass in D.
Little-known works by great composers are not automatically masterpieces; there are often good reasons for their neglect. Dvorak's Mass was composed first with organ accompaniment in 1887, and then arranged for orchestra for a performance in London six years later. It's tuneful, fluently written for the chorus (the BBC Symphony's own here) and rather dull, with a tendency to lollop along in 6/8, which is endearing at first but soon seems trite, while neither the soloists (Rebecca Nash, Louise Winter, Benjamin Hulett and Neal Davies in this case) nor the orchestra get a chance to assert themselves.
Davis had rather more to do in the first half, giving an amplitude to Elgar's Violin Concerto that provided the soloist Pinchas Zukerman with the perfect orchestral support. Because Zukerman is heard less often in London than he once was, it is easy to forget what a compelling performer he can be; here he delivered Elgar's solo writing in bold lines that were perhaps a little light on poetic inwardness but had the drama of the concerto constantly in focus.
There was more Elgar in the BBC Scottish Symphony's programme under its associate principal conductor Martyn Brabbins - Anthony Payne's "elaboration" of the sketches for the Third Symphony, which seems more and more a genuine part of the Elgar canon, with a musical architecture that is increasingly convincing. The only weakness is the rather unmemorable scherzo, which is, paradoxically, the movement for which Elgar left the most complete material, but the rest has a wonderful resonance, and Brabbins manipulated its conflicting moods - muscular lyricism in the opening movement, sombre self-communing in the adagio, swaggering ceremonial in the finale - with consummate assurance.
Earlier Brabbins had steered the BBCSSO through Peter Maxwell Davies's First Taverner Fantasia, one of the 1960s pieces that prepared the way for his opera on the life of the Tudor composer. It's a reminder of how Davies began, combining the techniques of European avant garde with his fascination for English early music. Goodness knows what the Proms audience made of it at the premiere in 1962.
