Prom 21, Osborne, Sinfonia of London, Wilson review - a spectacular drive across America

Does John Wilson ever stumble?

The Sinfonia of London, the Gateshead-born conductor’s ad hoc all-star super-band, rode into a full-to-bursting Royal Albert Hall once again last night with an all-American Proms programme that promised not just crowd-pleasing Stateside favourites (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in its centenary year, Barber’s Adagio for Strings) but the towering Yosemite peak of John Adams’s massive symphony-in-all-but name, Harmonielehre. 

There were a couple of moments, especially in a sometimes routine rendering of Copland’s Billy the Kid, when their famously blazing and brilliant ensemble sound seemed to mislay a little of its firepower. Yet they conquered the cloud-capped summits of Adams’s ridiculously improbable masterpiece from 1985 (am I a machine-tooled West Coast minimalist or a post-Mahlerian late romantic? Hey, folks, let’s be both!) as if scampering up a gentle slope. I hope we never take, not just this orchestra’s glossy high-definition virtuosity, but Wilson’s ferociously vigilant attention to instrumental and dynamic detail, for granted. He makes every gig into a gala occasion. This was no exception. The opener, Wynton Marsalis’s extended fanfare for brass and percussion Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!, gave an early taste of both sections’ swaggering punch and panache, and reminded us that the sounds of Black America always lie close to the heart of the nation’s musical journey. In fact, Marsalis – with his nods to Copland and Gershwin, and his initially abrasive harmonies – refuses nostalgic New Orleans indulgence or big-band pastiche for much of the piece. He finally allows the brass and drums their retro fun, but casts a quizzical, even ironic, eye over his own musical roots.

Copland’s ballet suite Billy the Kid has a similarly edgy relationship with the folk tunes it enlists to tell the outlaw’s tale: almost 1930s Russian-sounding dissonant passages vie with backwoods ditties. The Sinfonia strings, led by Charlie Lovell-Jones, ranged, then galloped, luxuriously over the Western plains as woods and brass filled the empty landscape with their piquant songs. Wilson seemed to allow a little too much leisurely expansiveness as the cowboys dawdled for a bit too long. Unusually for him, moments in the dances almost dragged. The sounds of the old West still glowed, however, as the ferocious percussion gunfight ended in Copland’s offbeat polka. 

In contrast, Barber’s Adagio for Strings felt taut, retrained, controlled. Wilson’s tight leash and grasp of shape and pulse meant that elegy never subsided into schmaltz. The sheen, poise and gravitas of the strings – their keening sustained in gorgeously extended phrases – delivered everything we expect from this outfit, and more. Wilson can make you hear even the most hackneyed soundtrack standby (and they don’t come more shopworn than this) afresh.  For Rhapsody in Blue, he employed the now-standard Ferde Grofé arrangement, with Steven Osborne as the pianist. Just as it should, Chris Richards’s clarinet bent and twisted outrageously, stretching the glissando to breaking-point just as Gershwin does with the concerto form. Osborne (pictured above) proved a lithe, loose-limbed interpreter, properly bluesy but surprisingly delicate too. As you’d expect, Wilson pushed the band through a terrifyingly metronomic chordal production-line. We think of the Rhapsody as jazz and blues breaking the chains of traditional classical form, but don’t forget that Theodor Adorno found in such music the scary embodiment of machine-age industrial uniformity. 

You have to hear that relentless drive, and Wilson’s piston beat – not just rather brisk, but arguably over the speed limit – never softens it. The brass snorted and bit, while the strings, especially in the broad and sumptuous second theme, embraced us in a deep plush hug. Osborne’s debonair legato excursions made us remember that Gershwin, for all his funkiness, still had the great Romantic piano showpieces firmly in mind. His encore, Ellington’s “Things ain’t what they used to be”, beautifully channeled the refined spirit of Oscar Peterson. There’s a certain kind of cool cross-genre aesthete who would have found in this the purest music of the evening. 

That polo-necked snob would also have relished the post-interval performance of Charles Ives’s mystical meditation The Unanswered Question, with flutes on stage as unseen clusters of musicians (pictured below) high in the balconies – notably the forlorn, questing trumpet – throw ambiguous enquiries back and forth. Spare, bleak, quiet, the piece proved that Wilson can command small-group pianissimo hush as much as fortissimo blasts. He knows how to paint in slender austere marks as well as in a bold rainbow palette.  Schoenberg admired Ives (though he also loved his friend Gershwin), and the composer’s tract Harmonielehre lends its name to Adams’s mightily ambitious almost-symphony. You would have rightly expected the Sinfonia to make an absolute sonic feast of those parts of Adams’s work that absorb and refashion the kaleidoscopic harmonic colours of early Schoenberg, late Mahler – and even Wagner himself. That they duly, and breathtakingly did, with extraordinary warmth to the string tone (notably, to my ears, Jonathan Aasgaard’s cellos), brass that slashed, pierced and smouldered by turns (not least James Fountain and the trumpets), and a glorious gamut of percussion flavours served up by timpanist Matthew Hardy and his six colleagues. Both here, and throughout the evening, the brace of tubas – Dave Kendall, Sasha Koushk-Jalali – made, in every sense, an outsize contribution.

Yet all this beauty harbours a beast. The crashing, grinding minimalist chug of the initial E minor chords never really leave the scene. Wilson’s relentless clarity and hard-driving rhythmic push – the mechanistic quality in his conducting that leaves some listeners cold – proved a perfect foil for the chromatic reveries of Adam’s unfolding themes in the first movement, and the melancholy, introspective nocturne-like music of his second act, “The Anfortas Wound”. Fountain’s solo trumpet guided us tenderly through this field of uneasy dreams, with its jolting eruptions of nightmare memories that allude to Mahler’s Tenth. As for the finale, “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie”, with its joint inspiration from the composer’s little daughter and medieval mysticism, Wilson gave a masterclass in orchestral blend and balance, light and shade, force and finesse. He steered his juggernaut round the tightest corners and down the narrowest lanes, with quieter passages just as dramatically intense as the stupendous tutti. Something of the propulsive momentum of his Rhapsody returned as Wilson accelerated towards the great E major sunburst that finishes the piece. 

After which, a rapturously strung-out audience needed to relax. But the Sinfonia’s encore, however playful, still kept us on our toes: Leroy Anderson’s motoric Boston Pops favourite, Fiddle Faddle. Even at rest, Wilson swings.

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