Martyn Brabbins’ concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra was his second appearance with them at the Proms this summer. As he told the audience in a brief speech before he ended the concert with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, he should not have been there at all, for it should have been conducted by Andrew Davis, who died very soon after the season was announced. The evening became a tribute to Davis, one of the most admired of British conductors, who was the BBCSO’s chief conductor for 11 years and very much came to embody the Proms, especially with his speeches on the Last Night.
The Elgar and the Ritual Dances from Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage, as radiant and rhapsodic as ever, were brought into the concert to reflect Davis’s love of British music. The first half, however, remained unchanged. Brabbins began with a fierce, almost caustic account of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, before the first UK performance of a BBC co-commission, Steve Reich’s Jacob’s Ladder. Like his Traveler’s Prayer, first heard in London in 2021, it was composed during the pandemic, and like that work it is a setting of Hebrew texts from the Old Testament, in this case four verses from Genesis in which Jacob dreams of a ladder to heaven.
