The god Pan was not just a little goat-like creature skipping around playing irritating pipe music, but a fearsome force of nature: it’s where the word panic comes from. That was the inspiration for B Tommy Andersson’s new Proms commission for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, where he is composer in association. Pan is written for the venue inasmuch as there is a starring role for the Royal Albert Hall’s great beast of an organ. In this Prom, under conductor Thomas Søndergård, organist David Goode unleashed the full force of the instrument at the beginning and end of the piece – moments that made the seats and the floor shake.
There are arresting moments in between, when the organ combines with the brass to make sounds that scythe across the orchestra, but the rest is less striking. Faster passages suggest cloven-hoofed pursuit – except that the earliest of these is in waltz time, and sounds more elegant than desperate. There are long solos and duets featuring a flute that seem to have not quite enough to say. At 20 minutes, this is a substantial score, but without the organ, it would seem very slender.
Only a few years after Charles Ives captured the melee of several bands playing in different tempos in The Fourth of July, Carl Nielsen used a similar multilayered technique to transport the listener to an Arabian market in his incidental music for Aladdin. This was the highlight of the five excerpts from Nielsen’s score played here, which showcased some tender string playing in Aladdin’s Dream; the two dances at the end, though, could have used more shape from Søndergård. The orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony had similar strengths and weaknesses, Søndergård being more effective at infusing individual episodes with energy than at tying them together into an evolving whole. Still, soprano Klara Ek sounded aptly innocent in the final movement, and the very end had all the serene stillness one could want.
• Listen again on BBC iPlayer until 3 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.
