Photo, Chris Christodoulou
Friday, September 12, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
This penultimate Prom of the 2025 Season clashed directly with a concert live from Dublin (which I didn’t want to miss). John Wilson started with a dashing and expressive Strauss Don Juan (without stealing a march on numerous other interpreters), although the timpani solo at the beginning needed to be much clearer (Paavo Järvi is your man here, below). Then James Ehnes played Leonard Bernstein’s five-movement Serenade after Plato’s ‘Symposium’ – Greeks bearing musical gifts – which demonstrated to a much greater degree the music that Sinfonia of London (here strings, harp, and percussion) and Wilson can excel at. With James Ehnes technically immaculate and musically identified this was a performance totally attuned to a score that can have its pleasures not fully revealed, for this reading was magnetic and authentic. I feel a Chandos recording in the making, hopefully. Ehnes encored with some quicksilver Bach (Sonata III, final movement) on his wonderful-sounding Strad.
Already on Chandos from this team is Ravel’s Daphnis, which I was in two minds about – nothing in writing – yet this concert account was magical (I gather that Ehnes guested in the Sinfonia ranks), Wilson moderating the music judiciously between the meticulously notated pages’ requirements and the acoustic being played in, often to bewitching effect, with no lack of excitement when the pirates turn up or in the final bacchanal of general rejoicing (SoL Chorus ah-ah-ing orgiastically), while ‘Daybreak’ blossomed beautifully, and later Adam Walker’s flute was pantomimic with the best of them. Reservations from the recording didn’t surface here. An encore wasn’t expected until the ‘Panorama’ from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty entered, suave and radiant, maybe superfluous, certainly generous.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002hxp8