You can talk symphonic architecture, pacing and balance all day long, but when Elgar is right you just feel it. A good First Symphony lands somewhere between heart and head, each tugging you back and forth between admiration and emotion at a piece Hans Richter famously called “the greatest symphony of modern times”. In their first Prom of the season Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra gave us a handsome account, playing up to the generous proportions of the hall, but we never quite saw “it”.
Wigglesworth is a conductor who thinks in chapters, you can hear the long lines of his structures from the hyper-hushed opening Andante – whose payoff will appear nearly an hour later in the finale, when we arrive where we started and know it for the first time. But we could also hear an orchestra thinking in paragraphs. Transitions were often choppy in the first two movements, episodes in the final Allegro lacked a sense of context, balance wasn’t always perfectly voiced in the Adagio. Nothing fatal, but enough to keep us thinking rather than feeling.
There was plenty of sensation in the first half, in the filmic sweep and shimmer of Judith Weir’s 1995 Moon and Star – Emily Dickinson’s poem gleaming under layers of orchestral texture, less a traditional setting than a prismatic explosion of imagery, the verse the crystal at its centre – and the theatricality of Brett Dean’s new orchestral song-cycle The World’s Wife.
Carol Ann Duffy’s wry, confessional, irreverent verse supplies five poems for a work that looks over the shoulders of famous men – Icarus, Darwin, Perseus – at the women standing behind them in the shadows. Soprano Claire Booth is a stage animal, seizing Duffy’s text and bending it variously into love-song, satire, prayer and meditation. She’s helped by Dean, who pitches his monodrama somewhere between Pierrot Lunaire and Façade – stylised and a little arch, but so richly and strangely textured that it creates new spaces in Duffy’s tight, epigrammatic poetry, filling them with ambiguity and interest.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 12 September
