There is one thing to look forward to in the last night of the proms this year: a set of variations on a theme by Purcell, commissioned from eight leading composers of our time. Such composite pieces aren't a new idea, of course, and in Wednesday's late-night prom the BT Scottish Ensemble, directed by Clio Gould, played one of the new work's most celebrated British antecedents, the Variations on an Elizabethan Theme, more commonly known as Sellinger's Round.
It was Benjamin Britten who hatched up that idea to open the Aldeburgh festival in the coronation year of 1953. His assistant Imogen Holst made an arrangement of the original theme; Britten contributed a variation himself, and then invited five of his colleagues - Arthur Oldham, Michael Tippett, Lennox Berkeley, Humphrey Searle and William Walton - to add their thoughts, too. At the first performance, apparently, no one was told who had written what. But with 50 years of hindsight, some of the authorships seem startlingly clear: the rigorous Schoenbergian approach of Searle, the bombast of Walton, Britten's own sleight of hand, and especially the proliferating tendrils of Tippett's dark-hued elegy, which anticipate his Corelli Fantasia, first performed a couple of months later.
The Corelli Fantasia was one of the three English string-orchestra masterpieces that made up the rest of programme, for which the BT Ensemble joined forces with the Australian Chamber Orchestra under Richard Tognetti. The Tippett was by turns radiant and profound, and always tellingly detailed; they also gave a supple, if sometimes less than incisive, account of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro, and a rhapsodically devout performance of Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia.
Thursday's concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Joseph Swensen was an uninspired piece of programme building, delivered with much energy but not enough distinctive flavour. The highlight was Lars Vogt's disciplined account of Schumann's Piano Concerto. Vogt can be a muscular, assertive pianist, but here the overriding characteristic of his playing in the first movement and the Intermezzo was delicacy; he then let rip in the finale. Swensen's tendency to overegg expressive nuances nearly spoilt some passages, though not as much as it harmed Sibelius's The Swan of Tuonela and First Symphony. Two orchestral preludes from Nielsen's Saul and David suited his approach far better.
