Edward Gardner’s Prom with a combined orchestra of players from London’s Royal Academy of Music and New York’s Juilliard School opened with the UK premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Metacosmos, first heard in New York last year. Forming part of the Proms’ exploration of music and space, it deals with “the speculative metaphor of falling into a black hole,” as Thorvaldsdottir puts it, and is rooted as much in human experience of the unknown as in the cosmic or metaphysical.
A work of paradoxes, it seeks to create order and beauty out of chaos. Its opening phrases heave upwards over a low percussive rumble, before brass chords eventually anchor the music in rhythmic inexorability. At its centre is a broad cello melody of astonishing directness, but its contours and harmonies are repeatedly pulled out of shape by a dissonant countermelody on the upper strings. Gardner conducted with admirable surety, and the orchestra sounded excellent, with their dark, full strings and bright brass and woodwind.
It was followed by Britten’s Violin Concerto, completed in 1939 and a sorrowful reflection on the conflict that was engulfing Europe. James Ehnes was the soloist in a performance of refined lyricism, at once beautiful, meditative and intense. Someone’s mobile phone and a brief disturbance in the auditorium intruded on the final passacaglia, but ultimately didn’t detract from the sublimity of its close.
After the interval came Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, exhilaratingly done, if occasionally extreme in its dynamic range, with the muted brass barely audible at one point in the introduction to Part Two. The ending was electrifying.
