On the radio, what you notice first about John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London concerts is the pinpoint quality of the orchestra’s sound. But that is nothing compared to the experience of listening to it live in the Royal Albert Hall, where the vivid immediacy of the playing that he conjures from his musicians is the hallmark attraction of any Wilson Prom. Speaking from recent experience, it is a bit like regaining 20:20 vision after years of peering through the misty glaze of cataracts.
This precision was instantly apparent in the crystalline woodwind opening of Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps, orchestrated shortly before the composer’s early death in 1918, and in the softer and darker writing into which this delicately formed five-minute miniature briefly broadens.
It felt as light as air however when compared with the visceral impact of the orchestra’s sweeping entries in Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. Everything about the Sinfonia’s contribution was virtuosic, right down to some breathtakingly soft cymbal playing in the finale. You don’t often hear string tones of this richness these days either, although at times it threatened to flood the fluently industrious playing of Alim Beisembayev, the 2021 Leeds international piano competition winner, a late replacement for the indisposed Benjamin Grosvenor.
Beisembayev has something about him of the grand pianistic manner of the great Cuban-American virtuoso Jorge Bolet, who was similarly undemonstrative at the keyboard, while commanding an equivalently sparkling technique, rhythmic control and dynamic range. Beisembayev reeled off the concerto as if he was to the manner born, though with less of the individuality that Grosvenor might have brought to it. A dazzlingly fast encore of the Danse Infernale from Stravinsky’s Firebird brought the house down.
After the interval, and a mere two days after Klaus Mäkelä’s fine Proms account of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, Wilson completed the Walton mini-fest with the first symphony. This was Walton on steroids. Every twitching nerve in the first movement was pumped with drama. The angry second movement and the flute’s song of loss in the third were soaked in passion. Wilson’s fierce attention to dynamic contrasts made other performances seem lazy by comparison. Maybe he can bring the same advocacy next year to Walton’s far less often heard second symphony.
