Last night's LSO Prom was to have been conducted by the orchestra's former principal conductor, Colin Davis, but following his sad demise earlier this year his place was taken by the orchestra's principal guest conductor, Daniel Harding. Nobody, surely, could have felt shortchanged: Harding is a conductor who rarely fails to make you think in a new way about pieces you thought you knew well.
After an arresting dispatch of a brass fanfare by Michael Tippett, it was the turn of the strings in the same composer’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra. If the first movement represents English pastoralism fertilised with the mulch of jazz, Harding and his alert players were faithful to both. The Adagio cantabile is also blues-tinged to plangent effect — it’s no coincidence that it was being written at precisely the time of the breakdown of Tippett’s first serious love affair. But Harding dared to dig deeper and entered the emotional territory of Wilfred Owen’s “titanic tears” and the sweetest wells “sunk too deep for war”, which also rings true, given that the work dates from the outbreak of the Second World War.
Ian Bostridge warned in an interview that his reading of Britten’s Les Illuminations would be expressionistic. And, indeed, he emphasised the savagery of the parade, the mordancy of the mockery. The unforgettable line “Your breast is like a zither” in Antique was biting in Bostridge’s delivery, while the characterisation in Royaute was positively operatic.
Most accounts of Elgar’s Second Symphony revel in the euphoria of its opening. But Harding’s ecstasy was far from unbuttoned and he continued with a deliberate pacing whose purpose gradually became clear: to emphasise the undertow of melancholy. In both the slow movement and the finale, the unfolding of material was daringly unhurried. Just occasionally it was possible to wonder whether it was all a touch mannered but the cumulative effect was profoundly moving.
Available on BBC iPlayer; the festival runs until September 7 (0845 401 5040, bbc.co.uk/proms).
