Five weeks after he made his last appearance as the City of Birmingham Symphony’s music director, conducting Beethoven’s Ninth during the opening weekend of this year’s Proms, Andris Nelsons was back at the Albert Hall with his new band. This was the beginning of a European tour for Nelsons and the Boston Symphony, and, coincidently or not, the programme for their opening concert consisted of two works that were featured during his final Birmingham seasons.
That made comparisons between this performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and the one Nelsons conducted in Birmingham four months ago inevitable. The outlines were more or less unchanged – though his tempo for the Andante was dangerously slow this time – but there was much more detail in the earlier account, a better perspective between the different departments of the orchestra, and a coherence about both the playing and the interpretation that never quite materialised here.
On this evidence there is plenty of work for Nelsons to do with the Boston players. Getting the brass section to realise that they do not have to play everything fortissimo would be a start, and that might encourage the string section to play with more buoyancy and character, too.
If parts of the Mahler sometimes sounded more like a trumpet concerto than a properly integrated symphony, there had actually been an authentic trumpet concerto before it, Brett Dean’s Dramatis Personae, which he composed for Håkan Hardenberger in 2013. Hardenberger brought it to Birmingham last year, and he was the fabulously agile soloist here, too, while Nelsons revelled in the almost Straussian vividness of the orchestral imagery that Dean places around the trumpet’s pirouetting lines, and the totally unexpected, tongue-in-cheek theatrical ending.
• Available on BBC iPlayer until 21 September. The Proms continue until 12 September.
