Review from The Times: Prom 57 Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä at the Albert Hall – August 31

What a stamping and a stomping and a whistling. The Prommers simply wouldn’t let the Minnesota Orchestra go. This was the second of their sold-out pair of Proms, and close to 6,000 punters wanted it to go on for ever. Hundreds in the audience will have known Osmo Vänskä’s take on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Minnesotans through their best-selling Beethoven cycle on CD, so there was an air of expectation.

Nothing, though, can ever prepare a listener for the dizzy momentum of the first movement, when a conductor such as Vänskä is energising the orchestra with his entire body and honing the cutting edge of the musical argument until it all but draws blood. And then, with the tip of his baton, drawing out the finest thread of an oboe or clarinet line which, somehow, you’d never heard before.

The Minnesotans’ pride in Vänskä and in themselves is now palpable. And when this fuses with a conductor’s long-considered yet ever self-regenerating understanding of a score, then the air is electric. The second movement all but levitated in its cosmic dance, minutely held back here and there to touch on a moment of bucolic earthiness.
And in the Adagio molto cantabile, song led easefully and inevitably to the oratory of the finale, with the bass Neal Davies reawakening the music to joy. Not a hint of sententiousness here, nor in the following long lines of arioso: Vänskä kept every instrumental voice on a taut rein.

When the BBC Symphony Chorus finally burst out, their every syllable was sharply marked. Vänskä treated the voices very much as orchestral forces: no mouthing of words from the podium, for this was not, for once, word-led. Rather, the chorus propelled and upheld the swirling, stratospheric voices of a particularly well-matched vocal quartet, with Davies joined by Eric Cutler, Charlotte Hellekant and Helena Juntunen.

Earlier Gil Shaham made a swift and welcome return to the Proms after his Barber Concerto, to substitute for an indisposed Lisa Batiashvili in a sentient and beautifully shaped performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto.

Hilary Finch
The Times