Photo, Chris Christodoulou
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
This Sunday-morning appearance by the RPO opened with Pines of Rome, unusually given its roof-raising, brass-laden conclusion, leaving the Vaughan Williams to gently if proudly let the Thames pass to close the concert. During the final week of this year’s Proms season, there are several works scheduled that have recently come my way in memorable performances… here the Respighi and the Vaughan Williams, the former from Helsinki a few days ago, and the latter featuring the Cleveland Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin (as part of this site marking the conductor’s eighty-first birthday), not for comparative purposes to the current concert, however, but simply registering my activities prior to it.
From Vasily Petrenko and the RPO, Pines was superbly articulate, details savoured, images created, whether awed or of nocturnal fragrancy (the latter from a bewitching clarinet solo inveigling a nightingale’s song), and with a spectacular ending to bring Roman history back to pounding life. From Rome to Paris via Brazilian folksongs (‘The ox on the roof’ being one of them) for Darius Milhaud’s Cinéma-fantaisie d’après ‘Le Bœuf sur le toit’, which I believe is the title for this revision (no confirmation on the broadcast), if a mistake for Milhaud to have added a solo violin to the brilliant original, and found space for a momentum-sapping cadenza (by Honegger), even when performed with style and accuracy, as here, Arabella Steinbacher continuing her excellence into an encore, the Bach-exposing first movement of Ysaÿe’s Second Sonata from the six of Opus 27.
Following the interval, A London Symphony (Ralph Vaughan Williams’s wonderful Symphony No.2) beginning with a mysterious dawn, then Big Ben’s chimes rousing a new day, speedily driven by Petrenko, grand gestures slightly out of kilter, yet folksy material was nicely buoyant, and with more-secluded depictions, deeply-felt, matched by the November-afternoon that was (here) the very broad slow movement, countered by the fleet and spectral Scherzo, played with a light touch, with further sights and sounds of the capital. The Finale finds the composer in social-commentary mode, Petrenko underlining the march’s slow trudge, with depth of feeling, and, following greater activity, the climax was built towards inexorably and powerfully delivered, the ‘solo’ gong-stroke vivid, and then the sudden reappearance of the Thames – in the Symphony’s end is its beginning or vice versa – and we’ll do it all again tomorrow.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hwrw
Bœuf original…
Second time I have been to a VW 2 concert in London under VP and he really does ‘get’ the music. Glad to see he takes it to Poland in a coupling with THE BELLS (sic!)