Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
Two undeniable masterpieces, with room for a possible third, and also the engaging overture to a composer’s solitary opera, Robert Schumann’s Genoveva. The last time I heard this romantic gem it was Zubin Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic, a concert that also included Tchaikovsky Four, and the soloist at this Prom, Stefan Dohr, is principal horn of that orchestra. Coincidences. Correspondences.
In January 2020 Dohr premiered Hans Abrahamsen’s Horn Concerto (Berliner Philharmoniker co-commission with Auckland, NHK, and Seattle), Paavo Järvi conducting, music that Dohr has since played numerous times, with at least two other hornists, including Chris Parkes, taking it up. There are three continuous movements – slow-fast-slow – alluring in its meditative expression, the quicker music finding the orchestra encircling the horn like fireflies, the solo instrument then becoming generously melodic as if distilling a forest legend, chimes adding enchantment, quiet bass drum rolls bringing an ominous air, although the final measures return to quick, requiring agility. If music can be subtly powerful, holding the attention by dint of drawing the listener in, then Abrahamsen’s twenty-minute Horn Concerto fits the bill. A few of the highest notes aside – on another night he’d have nailed them – Dohr was clearly the master of the piece and its precisely notated freedom, John Storgårds and the Philharmonic sympathetic partners. The composer (born 1952) was present.
Following a nicely judged if rather colourless account of the Schumann, the musical identification stepped up a gear for Sibelius’s Pohjola’s Daughter, Storgårds completely at-one with the score’s magical invocations and dramatic flare-ups, adding his own resolute expansions. The brass-writing at the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony was less than fateful, the first movement unfolded at a leisurely pace, neither emotional, intense nor passionate enough if well-prepared and -played, structurally secure, an adrenalin feed needed. The middle movements fared very much better, the first of them lovingly shaped and led off by a lovely oboe solo (I assume Jennifer Galloway) finding its way to a dark melancholy riposted by the Scherzo’s (here) quicksilver pizzicatos and the Trio’s cavalcade of characters. The Finale was festive – Fate vanquished – except Fate hadn’t turn up, although some desultory between-movement clappers did; at least Storgårds got in first with an attacca into the final movement, which ended in energetic triumph.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021k23