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.
