You’ve got to feel for anyone who opens a concert featuring megastar pianist and “elfin, spiky-haired fashionista” Yuja Wang. Her Proms appearance this year alongside 27-year old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä – whose own recent ascent has been vertiginous, and who is also Wang’s partner – generated a capacity audience and a long, hopeful queue for returns.
In this context the festival’s first taste of music by Peruvian composer Jimmy López Bellido was never likely to be headline material. It could, though, have been more than a disappointing starter. Percussion-heavy and harmonically repetitive, the UK premiere of his Perú Negro had rhythmic drive to burn but limited coherence. Mäkelä’s visible enthusiasm, as he bopped around the podium like a guest at a wedding disco, inspired mechanical jauntiness from the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The applause was polite.
One piano-move later and the audience was whooping before Wang had played a note of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The orchestral attack was incisive, its sound stylishly ferocious. Wang provided a masterclass in chamber-music performance, at times so thoroughly embedded in the orchestra that the solo part appeared to emanate from somewhere other than the grand piano. Elsewhere her fingers danced apparently without effort over large-scale orchestral schmaltz, deftly shaped melodies unmissable through purity of bell-like tone rather than volume. It’s tempting to take Wang’s absolute virtuosity for granted. But the pleasures of watching a pianist dispatch fistfuls of notes too quickly for the human eye without a single wrong note don’t fade. Those thrills-without-spills continued in two encores: a Rachmaninov polka and Vincent Youmans’ Tea for Two. “How cool is she?! SO cool!” squeaked one audience member.
Energy levels remained at fever pitch after the interval in Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. The BBC Symphony Chorus was on muscular form and baritone Thomas Hampson was ever-compelling, if underpowered in his voice’s lower reaches for a piece boasting such orchestral heft. Mäkelä’s approach was fast and furious: details aplenty, tutti chords that came down like a guillotine and a constant sense that we were about to career over a precipice. Occasionally it lacked poise – but the excitement was undeniable.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 9 October. The Proms continue until 9 September.
