‘Thy magic power reunites / All that custom has divided / All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings.” The BBC can’t have known when they booked Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – culminating in Schiller’s ode to fellowship and unity – that it would mark Andy Burnham’s appointment as prime minister. Our new leader’s “gentle wings” will need the span of a 747 to embrace every warring faction beneath them, but what a welcome from a Proms concert that was everything the festival does best.
A strange programme on paper – Bach, Beethoven and a brand new cello concerto – made absolute sense in the hall, where musical past and future were held suspended together in a rapt continuous present. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor set the tone. Arranged for orchestra by Andrew Davis, it had a distinct twinkle in its eye. Dutiful, even dogmatic, string exegesis takes a sudden sideways turn as the wind bend and distort the theme. And is that a celesta doubling the flute – a shimmering ghost in the orchestral machine, a childish distortion of the original organ? It’s wittily done, and under former chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra relished this fusion of sonic worlds.
