US composer Christopher Rouse describes Prospero’s Rooms, which had its UK premiere in this BBC Symphony Orchestra programme, taken over by the young Polish conductor Michał Nesterowicz from an ailing Joshua Weilerstein, as “an overture to an unwritten opera”. Rouse explains that if he wrote an opera, it would be based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death – but since he has ultimately decided not to write one, we will have to make do with this 10-minute orchestral reduction instead.
The result feels rather like an old-fashioned symphonic poem, attempting to tell a story through music. Its centrepiece is a fast section, in which the listener explores the seven differently coloured rooms in the abbey where Prince Prospero and his hedonistic guests are attempting to evade the plague, though it is not easy, from a purely musical point of view, to sense which of the various colours – blue, purple, green, orange and so on – we have reached. At any rate, what Rouse has produced is a lively, if frenetic, piece of orchestral writing that put the BBC players through their paces without leaving a deep impression behind.
Arguably more colourful, and certainly more substantial, was Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, which formed the second half. A relatively early work in the composer’s output, its blend of folk-like material with highly selective and virtuosic writing for large orchestra made for a thrilling listen, in a performance that showed Nesterowicz’s command of the score to be equal to that of his players – which is saying something. In the first half, meanwhile, Nesterowicz partnered pianist Steven Osborne – another late replacement, for an indisposed Jonathan Biss – in a confident and grandly scaled account of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto that lacked nothing in brilliance and depth.
