The new Proms season opened with Verdi’s Requiem, with Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the combined forces of the BBC Symphony and Crouch End Festival Choruses. The choice of work was significant. Large-scale choral and orchestral music is notably prominent this year after the constraints and restrictions of the previous two seasons, and future concerts include such varied repertory as Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Ethel Smyth’s Mass in D Major and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. The contrast between last year’s Last Night, with its socially distant chorus of just 37, and the massed choirs now assembled on the platform could not have been more pronounced.
The choral singing was unquestionably the thrilling centre of a sombre interpretation very much focused on humanity’s confrontation with the awesome majesty of an inscrutable God. Oramo powered his way through it all with considerable ferocity, for the most part swift in speed, urgent in mood, and notably extreme in dynamics, from the hushed opening string phrases, which seemed to slide imperceptibly out of silence into sound, to the fanfares and terrifying convulsions of the Dies Irae.
