Daniele Rustioni made his overdue Proms debut with the Ulster Orchestra, of which he is chief conductor, in a programme of Austro-German Romantics (Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, Schumann) that took him into very different territory from the Italian operatic repertory with which he is primarily associated. The qualities that characterise his work in the theatre, however – flair, intelligence, an immaculate sense of pace, tension and drama – also very much formed the basis of an exceptional concert that found him and his orchestra on terrific form.
He began with the Overture and Venusberg music from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, the opening austere, noble and strikingly slow, the erotic frenzy that counters it startlingly orgiastic and genuinely spine-tingling. The Venusberg section is difficult to balance in the Albert Hall, where the muddy acoustic can swallow much of the detail of Wagner’s complex string writing, but the playing here was wonderful in its accuracy and immediacy.
