Benjamin Britten’s music is such a staple ingredient of every season at the Proms nowadays that the chances of finding a piece – a substantial choral one, too – that had never been heard there must have been pretty slender. But Ryan Wigglesworth’s all-British programme with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and its chorus began with the Proms premiere of Ballad of Heroes, which Britten composed in 1939 for a London concert honouring the British members of the International Brigades who had fought in the Spanish civil war.
It’s a rather curious piece, which never really betrays its true colours, setting poems by both WH Auden, an ardent pacifist, and Randall Swingler, who was in favour of opposing fascism with force. Their texts are shared between a chorus and a solo tenor (Toby Spence in this performance) and woven into a single sequence. There are militaristic offstage trumpets, and anticipations not only of the Sinfonia da Requiem that Britten would compose a year later, in its sardonic orchestral commentary, but even of the War Requiem more than 20 years in the future, in the reflective, elegiac epilogue – though Wigglesworth kept the memorial emotions very much at arm’s length.
There was another choral work new to the Proms to open the second half too. Before a well-crafted, carefully thought out performance of the Enigma Variations, Wigglesworth conducted Elgar’s rather sober 1929 orchestral arrangement of Purcell’s motet Jehova, Quam Multi Sunt Hostes Mei, which does just what’s necessary to turn a baroque treasure into Three Choirs festival fodder, and no more.
The totally new music had come from Brian Elias, however. His Cello Concerto was written for Natalie Clein, but illness had forced her to withdraw from the concert two weeks earlier. Leonard Elschenbroich was the replacement, and he played the challenging solo part with such authority and commitment it was hard to believe he’d had such a short time in which to absorb it. It’s a genuinely rewarding work, in four substantial movements which are intricately laced together thematically. The cello writing seems thoroughly idiomatic too, always aware of what cellos can do best, while Elias’s orchestration is tactful enough to ensure that the soloist is always in charge of the musical argument.
•Available on BBC iPlayer until 8 September. The BBC Proms (link) continue until 9 September.
