In what has been, so far, a distinctly lacklustre Proms season for new music, the premieres of two violin concertos – both BBC commissions - held out the promise of real musical substance. They were unveiled at the Royal Albert Hall just a few days apart. Flanked by Elgar and Prokofiev, Philip Venables’ concerto, Venables Plays Bartók, was the centrepiece of Sakari Oramo’s latest programme with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, while the Bergen Philharmonic, under its music director Edward Gardner, framed Rolf Wallin’s Whirld with works by Wagner and Sibelius.
As its title suggests, Venables’ concerto is an exercise in autobiography, built around memories of playing Bartók’s Evening in the Village as a 14-year-old to his teacher’s teacher, the Hungarian emigré Rudolf Botta. Spoken entries from Venables’ diaries and extracts from Botta’s autobiography are overlaid on a sequence of what Venables calls “musical postcards”, his orchestral arrangements of Bartók’s folk transcriptions.
In a sense, it is more musical documentary than concerto, charting Botta’s struggles against the Nazis and the subsequent Soviet regime, before moving the England where he taught at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. But it is a showcase for the soloist, Pekka Kuusisto, too, exploiting both his breathtaking technique and the intrinsic winsomeness of his onstage performances.
Wallin’s Whirld is a more conventional violin concerto, and much more musically substantial. The four linked movements come with their own extra-musical trappings; fractal geometry was used to create the melodic lines that thread through the often dense textures, while alchemical imagery and the associated colours provide the titles of the movements.
But even without such associations, the music makes complete, involving sense: its intensely demanding writing for the solo violin – likened by Wallin to an alchemist’s dove “flying up and down in the fuming laboratory retort” – is overlaid on orchestral writing that threatens but never overwhelms it. Most of all, it is the perfect vehicle for Alina Ibragimova’s special brand of virtuosity. It is hard to imagine another soloist presenting the concerto with the intensity and commitment she brought to it here.
