The first of this year’s two Boston Symphony Proms with Andris Nelsons closed with Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, a work central to the orchestra’s history. They gave the first US performance late in 1945 under their then music director Serge Koussevitzky (the world premiere had taken place, in wartime, in Moscow, the previous January), and then went on to make the first commercial recording the following year. And it’s still uncommonly well suited to their dark, weighty sound with its bright, forward brass, rich strings and warm, focused woodwind.
Prokofiev completed the symphony in 1944, claiming it depicted “the greatness of the human spirit”, though we can also detect ironies and ambiguities in it as a product of the Stalinist era. Nelsons made much of the scherzo’s sudden lurch towards mechanism, and the way the warmth drains briefly from the finale before its joie de vivre reasserts itself. Elsewhere, he tapped a vein of sombre lyricism, shaping the monumental first movement with lofty grandeur, and was detailed and heartfelt in his treatment of the adagio. Superbly played, this was extremely fine.
Before the interval came Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung and the European premiere of Julia Adolphe’s Makeshift Castle. The latter is a two-part study of the relationship between memory and emotion, inspired by Adolphe’s own recollections of her late father being moved to tears by reminiscences of his mother while he and Adolphe, then a young child, were watching a sunset over a lake. Post-Romantic in idiom, it’s attractively scored. Slowly shifting textures suggest the omnipresence of mutability: an almost glaring refulgence fades to twilight; and a bitter threnody is eventually tempered by reflection.
Its preoccupation with memory also links it with Strauss’s depiction of a dying artist recalling his painful strivings in life for ideals that can only be perfectly realised beyond the grave. Strings, harp and woodwind sounded ravishing at the start, though we could perhaps have done with more tension and violence in the jolting recollections and terrors of the central allegro. The final transfiguration, though, building slowly to its climax, was almost overpowering in its splendour.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 9 October. The Proms continue until 9 September.
