BBC Proms 2026 – Berliner Philharmoniker (2/2) – Kirill Petrenko conducts Scriabin’s Third Symphony/The Divine Poem, and Augustin Hadelich plays Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

Photo, Berliner Philharmoniker/Lena Laine & BBC/Chris Christodoulou

REVIEWED FROM LIVE RELAY ON BBC RADIO 3

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Royal Albert Hall, London

On January 30, those with access to the Digital Concert Hall, the Berliner Philharmoniker’s platform for its live broadcasts and substantial archive, may well have caught the Scriabin Symphony known as ‘The Divine Poem’. Then it was coupled to Brahms’s Violin Concerto, with Janine Jansen. Now it came with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, soloist Augustin Hadelich, and he played the Brahms the weekend before last at the Salzburg Festival.

With BP/KP, led by creamy-rich woodwinds Hadelich gave a spacious/getting slower first movement, poised, shapely and expressive to be sure, confiding too, but the longer it went on, twenty-five minutes or thereabouts, the more lethargic it seemed. The cadenza was Kreisler’s. The middle movement, also time-taken, offered too little contrast, and the Finale danced vigorously, if too fast, for the music if not the performers, virtuosos all, perhaps too consciously a swift riposte to the previous movements. Hadelich’s encore, as for Salzburg, was his persuasive transcription of ‘Träumerei’ from Schumann’s Kinderszenen.

Inexplicably, ‘The Divine Poem’ failed to take off (this time), music motivic and striding in search of fulfilment, with enchanted pastures along the way. No doubt that the playing was superb – powerful and sensitive – that Petrenko had the work’s continuous wholesome structure in his grasp (Golovanov, below, is more diversionary, shall we say, and incendiary), and that the conclusion was resplendent. My off evening; I shall find a mountain and meditate.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0030jmq

Berliner Philharmoniker – Kirill Petrenko conducts Scriabin’s The Divine Poem (Symphony No.3), with Janine Jansen playing Brahms’s Violin Concerto. Live Digital Concert Hall webcast (if, for this review, via the DCH’s second repeat showing).

Vienna Philharmonic at Salzburg Festival 2026. Christian Thielemann conducts Brahms – Violin Concerto with Augustin Hadelich and Symphony No.1. Live relay on Österreich 1 [oe1.ORF.at].

USSR All-Union Radio Symphony Orchestra. Recorded 1946.

BBC Proms 2026 (100th post) – Berliner Philharmoniker (1/2) – Kirill Petrenko conducts Elgar, Enigma Variations & Tchaikovsky, Fourth Symphony.