With visits from European orchestras so few and far between at this summer’s Proms, the BBC is making sure that it is getting full value out of its house ensembles. This was the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic’s third visit to the Albert Hall in just nine days, and its second concert there under its chief conductor John Storgårds. The programme was mostly mainstream repertoire – Schumann’s Genoveva Overture, Sibelius’s tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter, and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, all in routinely efficient performances – but its centrepiece was the UK premiere of arguably the most intriguing new work in the entire season, Hans Abrahamsen’s Horn Concerto.
Before he began studying composition, Abrahamsen was a horn player, and this concerto seems at least partly an exercise in nostalgia, a remembrance of things past. He completed it four years ago for Stefan Dohr, principal horn of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Dohr was the immaculate soloist here, too. The three seamless movements move from slow, gentle dreaming to urgent activity and then back to consoling melodic lines, as the horn lines drift over fragile orchestral landscapes, with the large orchestra used very sparingly.
Some of the fine, glinting detail that’s so characteristic of Abrahamsen’s orchestral writing inevitably went missing in the hall, which seemed too large a space for a work of such quiet intimacy, but listening again later to the broadcast revealed how carefully imagined that background is, and how the solo horn lines are etched against it, as they move between the instrument’s conventional modern tuning and its natural harmonics, with their microtonal inflections. Dohr moved between the two effortlessly; he was a master of all the demands Abrahamsen’s score made of him, in what seems, in its quiet, unassertive way, an extraordinary and slightly mysterious work.
Available on BBC Sounds. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September
