The Proms has packed its centenary tribute to Henri Dutilleux into three successive concerts this week. The BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Juanjo Mena, gave the second of them, with Dutilleux’s Baudelaire-inspired cello concerto Tout un monde lointain ... – featuring Johannes Moser as the musing, rhapsodic soloist – the centrepiece of their programme.
Its fragile suggestiveness contrasted sharply with the assertions of Elgar’s First Symphony, which came after it, though Mena’s performance of that work wasn’t particularly subtle or illuminating. The playing of the BBC Philharmonic was always utterly secure, but Mena filled in Elgar’s orchestral colours with the broadest of brushes. Vital detail did not matter as it should, rhythms were never quite tight enough, and the catharsis of the final pages lacked the necessary thrill.
The concert had begun with the London premiere of Israfel, by the orchestra’s composer-in-association, Mark Simpson. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about a singing Qur’anic angel, it’s a 12-minute orchestral study in gleaming, aspirational ideas, which eventually reaches a lyrical climax before ending in much more circumspect musical territory. Detail had gone missing in this work too – Simpson’s orchestral writing is sometimes luxuriantly multi-layered – but the acoustics were surely to blame for that, and those listening on Radio 3 probably got to appreciate more of it than those of us in the hall.
• On BBC iPlayer until 8 September. The Proms continue until 10 September.
