The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and its chief conductor Vasily Petrenko brought a late-Romantic programme to the Proms, consisting of works by Richard Strauss and Elgar.
Petrenko began with two Strauss rarities, both dating from 1913. Written for the opening of the Vienna Konzerthaus, and scored for mammoth orchestral forces, including an organ and an outsize brass section, the Festival Prelude shows the composer at his most extravert and effusive; yet the result justifies its position in a concert programme in a performance as ebullient as this one. Petrenko and his players went for the material with unstinting relish.
Next the BBC Singers took to the platform for a piece that few other choirs could convincingly attempt – Strauss’s Deutsche Motette, a sizable unaccompanied setting of Friedrich Rückert for 16-part chorus and four soloists – here soprano Suzanne Shakespeare, mezzo Tara Erraught, tenor Adrian Dwyer and bass Brindley Sherratt. This was a bold undertaking - any slippage in pitch over the 20-minute span of the piece could have spelt disaster. Instead, Petrenko led a performance whose security was as remarkable as the range of colours he drew from both choir and soloists, and the flexibility with which he kept the music on the move.
These qualities were maintained throughout the better known pieces that followed. Danish soprano Inger Dam-Jensen was the delicate-toned soloist in Strauss’s Four Last Songs, soaring easily aloft while beneath Petrenko and the Liverpool musicians kept the instrumental textures clear and clean; outstanding solos from the orchestra’s joint leader, James Clark, and its principal horn, Timothy Jackson, added to the interpretation’s stature.
Even finer was the closing work, Elgar’s Second Symphony - one of the composer’s most elusive and ambiguous statements, whose complex structure and expressive subtleties were imaginatively explored in a virtuoso performance that demonstrated Petrenko’s mastery of its idiom.
