Two years ago, the starting point for Julian Anderson‘s first foray into concerto writing, the violin and orchestra piece In Lieblicher Bläue, was a late poem by Hölderlin. But for his new piano concerto The Imaginary Museum – commissioned by the BBC for this year’s Proms and given its first performance by the dedicatee Steven Osborne, with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – the inspiration seems to have been geographical. Six short movements take the piano on an imaginary 25-minute journey well beyond the confines of the concert hall.
What begins in the Albert Hall itself, with the piano testing out the acoustics with a succession of quiet phrases, is followed by a movement called Janáček’s Wells, a reference to the Czech composer’s fascination with the wells of his home village and their acoustic properties, before movements associated with the sea, forests, birdsong, sunrise and mountains, though Anderson admits that the concerto can be appreciated as a purely abstract work without any reference to the museum that inspired it.
Listening later to the BBC broadcast of the concert, The Imaginary Museum seemed a more impressive work and a far more convincing concerto than it ever had in the Albert Hall, where the impression was rather diffuse. The microphones gave Osborne’s playing a much more forward balance against the orchestra than it had live, when too much detail of the piano-writing, especially Osborne’s perfectly poised playing in the concerto’s long quiet stretches, was obscured. Some of the immense refinement of Anderson’s scoring – which includes the use of sampled piano sounds tuned a quarter-tone flat that “shadow” the soloist at various points – was lost live, too.
Volkov had built a wholly pictorial, programmatic concert around the premiere. It ended with another musical tour – around the gallery of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, vividly delivered by the BBCSSO in Ravel’s spangled orchestration – while interleaved with the other works were two of Liszt’s 13 symphonic poems, which have become a bit of a Volkov speciality. Hamlet, which was being heard for the first time at the Proms, is more a double psychological portrait than a narrative, concentrating very much on Hamlet and Ophelia and ending inevitably with a funeral march; From the Cradle to the Grave is a piece of stark contrasts, with enough striking incident to make one really wonder why it and Liszt’s other poems aren’t heard in concerts far more often.
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Available on BBC iPlayer until 25 August. The BBC Proms continue until 9 September.
