Sunday’s evening Prom featured a new piece by the Russian-born, American composer Lera Auerbach, intriguingly entitled The Infant Minstrel and His Peculiar Menagerie.
Now in her early 40s, Auerbach labels this symphonic cantata her Symphony No 3. It is scored for big forces: a solo violinist performing a vast obbligato part and no fewer than five vocal soloists, plus large chorus and orchestra. Under conductor Edward Gardner – who gave the piece its premiere in Bergen in April – the result was confidently delivered, its often brilliant surface registering with immediate effect; but by the time its 40 minutes were up, it felt thin and unfocused.
Auerbach sets words that are officially credited jointly to her and someone called “Erroneous Anonymous”, but which the programme note suggested are entirely the composer’s own. If the violin represents the Infant Minstrel of the title, rather as its equivalent in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is the female narrator of Tales from the 1001 Nights, then Auerbach’s fairy stories are nonsense poems with a core of heavy-handed satire: the little husband in Who Plays My Drum?, for instance, is revealed as Donald Trump.
The piece is fun for a while, even if the texts feel slight and awkwardly set. Vadim Gluzman brought passionate commitment to the enormous violin part, which would have been more effective if shorter. Of the five soloists, Andrew Watts’s heroic countertenor and Nina Bennet’s stratospherically inclined soprano made the strongest impact, though soprano Helen Neeves, tenor Tom Raskin and bass Andrew Rupp clearly enjoyed the parodistic elements they shared with the hardworking Crouch End Festival Chorus, who supplied the choral underpinning.
Elsewhere in the programme, Gardner proved an outstanding interpreter of two French classics, bringing innocence and charm to Ravel’s Mother Goose suite and fluidity and vigour to Debussy’s La Mer. The BBC Symphony Orchestra played magnificently for him in these, and in a rarity – two incomplete fragments by Debussy written as incidental music to King Lear and orchestrated after the composer’s death by Jean Roger-Ducasse, the melancholy second, in particular, like an offcut from Pelléas.
In the afternoon Prom, the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon repeated their party trick of playing a substantial symphony from memory – here Mozart’s Jupiter, in a performance that was absolutely secure and full of spirit, even if a little more wit would not have gone amiss in the ländler-like minuet and trio.
Tom Service provided a worthwhile introduction to the Jupiter, with a little bit of audience participation thrown in, while also previewing the other pieces in the programme: a spry and lucid account of Strauss’s superabundantly lyrical Oboe Concerto with soloist François Leleux, and Wolfgang Rihm’s energetically inventive Hunted Form in its revised version of 2002.
It’s a piece in which ideas initially bounced around by a couple of violins are gradually taken up by the rest of the 21-piece ensemble, reaching extravagant heights of manic activity as they chase the musical material around; Collon and his players, though, dashed it off as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
•The Proms continue until 10 September. Proms 21 and 22 are available on iPlayer until 30 August. Parts of Prom 21 will be televised on BBC4 on 26 August.
