For the first of their four visits to the Albert Hall this summer, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was conducted by Ariane Matiakh, who was making her Proms debut. On disc, Matiakh has shown what a persuasive conductor of illustrative music she can be, and each of the three works in this concert came with its own programme, including one receiving its premiere that built around the life cycle of a colony of honeybees.
That was Sally Beamish’s Hive, a harp concerto in all but name, written for Catrin Finch who was the soloist here. Its four distinct movements correspond to the seasons, beginning with the dormancy of winter, with the bees clustered together to maintain a constant temperature in their hive, through the gradual stirrings of spring and the frantic foraging for nectar, to the highpoint of the summer swarms, with the emergence of a new queen and her mating flight, and finally back to the quiescence of autumn, as the colony prepares once more for winter.
The solo harp leads the vivid evocations of these events, framed by the gentle humming, thrumming of the opening and close; it leads but never over-dominates, for the rest of the orchestra is treated in a similarly vivid way. The musical material itself is never particularly memorable or striking, but it is all assembled with great skill and clarity, and certainly made an effective vehicle for Finch’s virtuosity, and for the precision of BBCNOW’s playing.
Hive was followed by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, the symphonic suite sounding less Russian than French as shaped by Matiakh, with her wonderfully refined ear for the score’s textures and colours. She had begun with another Thousand and One Nights work – the “fairytale overture” that is all that survives of the young Ravel’s plans for an opera on the theme. What’s so interesting about his Shéhérazade is not the obvious influences – Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov as well as Debussy – but its glimpses of the composer to come; the world of Ma Mère l’Oye and Daphnis et Chloé suddenly seems not very distant at all.
Available on BBC Sounds until 10 October. The BBC Proms continue until 10 September.
