Less than 24 hours after conducting the final chorus of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on Glyndebourne’s annual visit to the Proms, Ryan Wigglesworth was back in front of an orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. This time it was the Britten Sinfonia, with Wigglesworth featuring not only as a conductor, but also as composer and pianist, in a neat programme that led from Mozart to Stravinsky via Tchaikovsky, and included the first performance of his own Piano Concerto, co-commissioned by the BBC, for good measure.
The composer had provided his own programme note on the new concerto, and his rather dry, factual description did the piece no favours. It’s a much more attractive, vividly inventive piece than he implied, perhaps his most effective orchestral score to date. The neoclassical-sounding movement titles – Arioso, Scherzo, Notturno and Gigue – belie music that is constantly changing mood and direction, and engages the solo piano in intricate, beautifully coloured dialogues with the orchestra, with the gracefully scored nocturne at its heart. Wigglesworth’s claim that the solo piano writing is “neither bravura, nor particularly virtuosic” needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, too, though Marc-André Hamelin typically made light of all the challenges it presents.
The premiere was followed by the Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss, the concert suite that Stravinsky drew from his 1928 ballet score. It’s based on music by Tchaikovsky, but the assimilation is so seamless it’s often hard to tell where the Tchaikovsky ends and the Stravinsky begins, and Wigglesworth and the Britten Sinfonia balanced its rhythmic punch with luscious string lines and deft woodwind solos.
That certainly finished the concert on an upbeat note, but the first half had been less convincing. Mozart’s Concerto for two piano K365, with Hamelin and Wigglesworth (directing from the keyboard) as the soloists, had made a rather uncertain opening, not helped by the fuzziness that the Albert Hall acoustic regularly endowed on the piano lines, while Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana, his fourth orchestral suite, didn’t really justify the musical logic of including it; in the business of one composer appropriating the music of another, at least, Stravinsky significantly outdid his great Russian predecessor.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The Proms continue until 14 September.
