Semyon Bychkov conducted the first of the Vienna Philharmonic’s two appearances in the last few days of this year’s Proms. Their concert was devoted to two symphonies, one very familiar, the other – Franz Schmidt’s Second – barely known in this country and being heard for the first time at the Proms.
Schmidt had only just stepped down as the Vienna Philharmonic’s sub-principal cellist when his symphony was first performed in 1913, and it has the sense of a work written from the inside out, by a composer who knows exactly what every voice contributes to the orchestral textures that permeate all three of its movements. The strings are regularly subdivided, but despite the apparent density of the writing and the size of the orchestra involved there is still a translucent quality to it, a lightness that Bychkov and the orchestra conveyed wonderfully.
Though a few chromatic passages echo early Schoenberg – Pelleas und Melisande; Gurrelieder – the more regular stylistic comparison would be with Richard Strauss. But as Bychkov showed, even if the symphony is slightly too long, and not quite so memorably effective as Schmidt’s much better known Fourth, composed two decades later, it is a remarkable achievement from a remarkable period in music history, which we should have heard here more often.
As its appearance with Rattle in Birmingham two nights earlier had showed, the Vienna Philharmonic is at the top of its game at the moment. The sound was more sumptuously coherent and balanced than any other orchestra I’ve heard in the Albert Hall this summer, but the performance of Brahms’s Third Symphony was far from convincing. Bychkov’s slow tempi for the central pair of movements seemed to suck the energy from the outer ones too, and what should have been buoyant became dutiful and routine.
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On BBC iPlayer until 10 October. The Proms end tomorrow.
