There were symphonies by Dvořák and Brahms too, but the centrepieces of BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s two proms with its principal conductor Thomas Søndergård were concertos, both BBC commissions receiving their first performances.
Huw Watkins’s Cello Concerto is the first of three works he will write as BBC NOW’s composer-in-association, and also the latest in a line of pieces he has composed for his cellist brother Paul, who is currently a member of the Emerson Quartet. The three movements, a slow-fast-slow scheme, are predominantly restrained, and make the most of Paul’s fabulously velvety tone and ability to shape long expressive lines so powerfully. It’s a very British-sounding work, recalling cello works by Finzi and E J Moeran at times with passages that could have been composed 80 years ago, as well as a clear reference to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the central movement that was not explained. But the world the music evokes is entirely consistent, and Paul Watkins inhabited it comprehensively.
The previous evening, Tai Murray had introduced Malcolm Hayes’s Violin Concerto. Like the Watkins, it’s scored for a relatively modest orchestra, and uses it even more sparingly, often allowing the violin to spin its high, nimble figuration without any support at all. It’s a piece about creating space, says Hayes, born out of the communities and landscapes of the Outer Hebrides, where he lived in the 1970s, in form of a set of double variations that is often exceptionally beautiful. Perhaps for a work of such sustained rhapsodic contemplation it’s just a bit too long, but the musical ideas themselves and the sureness with which Hayes uses them are so fresh that it hardly matters.
• On BBC iPlayer until 10 September (Hayes) and 11 September (Watkins). The Proms continue until 10 September.
