Benjamin Grosvenor plays Ravel’s G major piano concerto with Ryan Bancroft conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Photograph: Andy Paradise/BBC
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s fourth Royal Albert Hall date this summer opened with the kind of thing UK audiences only really hear at the Proms: Sofia Gubaidulina’s Revue Music for Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Band, written in 1976. It’s not what you’d have expected from this serious, intense, spiritually driven composer, who died earlier this year – or, to be honest, from any other composer.
It opens in atmospheric, modern-classical style, ominous bells against high, tense strings. Then it explodes into funky bass guitar and brass, driving drum kit and the Star Trek-like ahhing of a close-miked vocal trio – here it was Synergy Vocals – and it’s as if the stage has been taken over by Magnum PI. Gubaidulina pits these two musics against each other, with the jazz-funk periodically dissolving into snatches of Mahlerian melody and translucent orchestral stillness – at one point a few lines of poetry are spoken on top, amid an aura of whispers from the orchestral players. Finally, there’s a slow splurge of Bond theme-ish excess – brilliantly bonkers, and the Albert Hall loved it.
