Substantial new works are few and far between in this year’s Proms, but Luca Francesconi’s violin concerto, Duende – The Dark Notes, was an exception: it’s both conceived on a large scale and hugely rewarding. In fact it was carried over from the 2014 season. Leila Josefowicz, for whom the work was written, was scheduled to introduce it at the Albert Hall last year, but then became pregnant and had to postpone; Stockholm got the world premiere last February. This then was the first British performance, with Susanna Mälkki conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
It was well worth the wait. As the title suggests, Francesconi’s concerto takes the idea of the Duende, the dark, demonic spirit of flamenco, as its starting point, but the music never seems simplistically pictorial or programmatic. Instead, with the violin as protagonist, the five movements (the last two merged seamlessly together) evoke a threatening world of extremes, of heightened emotions and dramatically contrasted colours and registers. The orchestra weaves febrile webs around solo writing whose cracked arpeggios and steep scales manage to be more or less traditionally virtuosic within musical contexts that are anything but conventional, especially in the ferocious cadenza at the heart of the final movement.
Josefowicz’s playing was immensely committed and astoundingly vivid, and it emerged in even sharper, more subtle focus in the Radio 3 recording, which also resolved many of the textures that had seemed rather blurred in the hall.
There was Boulez before the concerto, with Mälkki conducting the five of the piano Notations that have so far been transformed into glittering orchestral miniatures, and a regular Proms showpiece, Holst’s The Planets, after it. That performance began with tremendous no-nonsense incisiveness and drive but the intensity gradually leached away so that Neptune, the final movement, had very little otherworldly allure, with the wordless female voices (the Elysian Singers) anything but distant and disembodied.
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Available on iPlayer until 26 August. The Proms continue until 12 September.
