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Sacred music triumphs at the Proms

Alexandra Coghlan - The Tablet - Fri, Aug 13th 2021

Sacred music triumphs at the Proms

BBC Proms: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko - Royal Albert Hall, London

Sacred music is often a bit of an afterthought at the Proms. There’s the odd massed choral spectacular, but it tends to be more about sensation than spirituality – Verdi’s Requiem, maybe, or a period-instrument St Matthew Passion or Messiah. Otherwise faith is pretty much exiled to lunchtime concerts and the more accommodating acoustics of Cadogan Hall. So how brilliant to see it front and centre this year, in a concert (4 August) that not only celebrated the sacred, but even found new and thoughtful ways of framing it for a concert hall audience.

Conductor Vasily Petrenko, whose 15 years with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic yielded some spectacular recordings as well as a renewed energy and status for the orchestra, doesn’t officially join the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as music director until September – but if this preview concert was anything to go by, exciting times are ahead.

Following the something old, something new, and something unexpected rule of good programming, this concert brought together Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 (Reformation), with its ecstatic closing chorale and shimmering “Dresden Amen”, together with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The novelty was early-twentieth-century Italian composer Ottorino Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano – an almost wilfully unshowy violin concerto drawing heavily on plainsong melodies for its heady, incense-steeped atmosphere.

It’s a curious piece. As with Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn you can hear Respighi’s juggle between sacred material and secular context. In the first two movements it’s the spiritual that wins, first in the hazy, light-through-stained-glass meditation of an andante, the solo violin (coaxingly played here by Sayaka Shoji, making her Proms debut) a pinprick of musical light refracted through Petrenko’s deftly layered strings and woodwind, and then in the slow movement.

The coup is Respighi’s choice of theme – the sober Easter chant “Victimae paschali laudes”. Emerging shyly in the solo violin’s lower register, viola-warm, then carved deeper by the horns, its stern beauty floods the movement with solemnity. It’s as if the composer suddenly remembers his audience (no congregation here) and throws in a jaunty close whose chant theme has a folksy, syncopated quality that lends itself to a broad march. Subtle it isn’t, but it’s a cheerful end to a work that finds filmic glamour and scope in its sacred material.

Mendelssohn shows us how it’s done in his atmospheric Reformation symphony, and it was here – after the restraint of the Respighi and the careful blend and radiance of the Vaughan Williams – that Petrenko was able to let his new band off the leash, whether in the woodwind bell tolls of the opening or the flirtatious string writing of the allegro vivace or, most of all, the blazing finale in which we hear the Lutheran hymn “Ein feste Burg” decked out in brass splendour. It’s hard to make a big impression in the ­cavernous Royal Albert Hall (especially when socially distanced); but if the weight was just a little lacking then the spirit, after over a year of silence, was certainly charged.

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