Marin Alsop has raised the standards and profile of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra to new levels in recent years, but this Prom, midway through a short European tour, sometimes felt like a date too far in a crowded schedule, which also included a late-night Prom of Brazilian popular music.
Alsop’s energy on the podium is unflagging and her driving performance of the Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre’s crisply rhythmic Kabbalah was a promisingly idiomatic start to the evening. But with both Alsop and the soloist Gabriela Montero making unduly heavy weather of the Grieg piano concerto, things sagged. Montero’s tendency to slow the phrasing, particularly obvious in the opening movement, was the chief culprit, but it added up to a performance that never really took wing. Anyone who heard Martha Argerich re-energise another warhorse concerto, Liszt’s First, in the same hall last week could hardly fail to notice the contrast. Montero’s encore, a witty improvisation on Land of Hope and Glory, had the panache that her playing of the concerto had lacked.
Villa-Lobos’s string prelude to his fourth Bachianas Brasileiras provided a brief doffing of the cap to Brazil’s most celebrated composer at the start of the second half. One wanted more. But Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances found Alsop and the orchestra at their best, the wind section in particular. Ideally, this work at times requires a richer string sound than the Brazilians produced, but Alsop’s sensitivity caught the elusive mix of elegy and experiment that characterises Rachmaninov’s last orchestral score.
