It’s more than 30 years since Julius Eastman died, penniless and alone, in New York, yet a true sense of who he was as a composer and the significance of his achievement seems as elusive as it has ever been. Eastman’s works are still being edited and published; some of them are only now being performed for the first time, and the UK premiere of his only surviving orchestral score, Symphony No 2, which was rediscovered in 2018, opened the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Prom with their principal guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska.
The symphony proves to be another piece that makes a rounded picture of Eastman the composer even harder to grasp. Written in 1983 and dedicated to his former partner, it carries a subtitle, “The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved”; lasting barely 12 minutes in this performance, it’s scored for an enormous orchestra with multiple contrabass clarinets, contrabassoons, tubas and timpani players, and was intended to portray the course of their relationship, from beginning to breakup. The music veers between wandering string lines, curdled wind chords and layered Ives-like textures; there’s no hint of the motoric processes that energise so many of Eastman’s other pieces. But it seems more preliminary sketch than finished work, a torso badly needing further elaboration.
The rest of Stasevska’s programme was unproblematic. The mezzo Jamie Barton was the creamy-toned soloist in Mahler’s Rückert Líeder, steering a nice path between cool detachment and emotional indulgence, before Stasevska conducted Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. One could quibble with details of her reading – the transition from first movement to scherzo seemed less controlled than it could be; the faster section at the centre of slow movement seemed a little rushed – but the sense of purpose driving the performance from the first bar to the extraordinary final chords was unmistakable, and the BBCSO delivered it thrillingly.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September
• This article was amended on 26 August 2024. In an earlier version, the main image caption referred incorrectly to Sibilius’s Fifth Symphony, rather than Mahler’s Rückert Líeder.
