Santtu-Matias Rouvali took up his post as principal conductor of the Philharmonia in September last year. His opening season has included some memorable performances, especially of Strauss and Tchaikovsky, and so it was rather odd that for his first appearance with the orchestra at the Proms – Rouvali’s debut there, too – he should have opted for such an undemanding programme. Extracts from two of the most popular ballet scores – Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet – were separated by a novelty, the European premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s violin concerto, Procession, in which Jennifer Koh was the soloist.
Koh gave the first performance of Procession in Washington earlier this year. Mazzoli describes it as casting the soloist as “a soothsayer, sorcerer, healer and pied piper-type character”, who leads the orchestra through “five interconnected healing spells”. These five “spells” form an arch, with the final one providing a resolution of sorts to the first, while the second, a homage to the patron saint of dance, St Vitus, is a scurrying moto perpetuo which suddenly seems to run out of steam, while the third is a disarticulated paraphrase of a hymn, O My Soul.
