Outscape, Pascal Dusapin’s concerto for cello and orchestra, was the novelty in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second appearance at this summer’s Proms. The concert was conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, and his elder sister Alisa was the soloist in the piece Dusapin composed for her, which she had premiered in Chicago last year.
The title, the composer says, “carries the musical project within itself”, and though the word “outscape”, coined in the 19th century by Gerard Manley Hopkins, seems now to carry multiple meanings, Dusapin construes it in the sense of escaping elsewhere and finding one’s own path. That’s the journey undertaken by the cello in the concerto. There’s no hint of traditional concerto dialectic, no confrontational to and fro between soloist and orchestra, but instead the sense of two independent protagonists who sometimes move towards each other or exchange roles, yet always preserve their distinct identities.
The first half of the 27-minute, single-movement work is restrained and introspective, with the ruminating solo cello shadowed first by a bass clarinet and then by a succession of other instruments in the orchestra. The level of activity and the expressive intensity, increase in the second half, though a lot of that busy detail went missing in the Albert Hall; listening later to the BBC’s binaural recording was far more involving. By any standard, it’s a demanding challenge for the soloist, who is allowed very few chances to rest, though the long tendrils of melody that the cello spins do make the most of Alisa Weilerstein’s rich tone, and she projected them intensely.
For an encore she was joined by her brother as a violinist for one of Bartók’s Transylvanian Dances. Otherwise it was an all-French programme that Joshua Weilerstein had built around the Dusapin. It ended with Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, in what seemed a overly well-mannered and restrained performance, though a technically accomplished one. The concert also began with a rare chance to hear the BBCSO dip its collective toe into the French baroque repertory, except that the dissonant string cluster that opens the final Chaos movement from Jean-Féry Rebel’s 1737 dance suite Les Élémens could almost have seemed familiar territory for an orchestra so used to playing 21st-century music.
- Available on BBC iPlayer until 18 August. The BBC Proms continue until 9 September.
