The follies of the past century cast shadows across all three works in Vasily Petrenko's Prom with his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, from Delius's violin concerto, written during the first world war (though you would hardly guess it), through Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, self-consciously penned in the aftermath of Stalin's rule, to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's Ninth Symphony, partly conceived as a protest against "our disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan".
The other unifying feature of the evening was the unfailingly admirable precision and musical discretion of Petrenko's direction. Amazingly, it is 43 years since the Delius concerto was last heard at the Proms. There are obvious weaknesses in its construction, but Petrenko held the work together with great commitment, and Tasmin Little's enraptured account of this most improvisatory of works was so eloquent that it blew most doubts away.
Shostakovich's 10th has its weaknesses, too, but Petrenko's control and the Liverpool orchestra's playing made light of them. The great span of the opening movement can be more brooding than Petrenko allowed, but his attention to detail and string balance was gripping at all times, and he drew playing of exceptional beauty throughout – nowhere more so than in the keening woodwind solos that herald the tumult of the finale.
Davies may be Master of the Queen's Music now, and this Ninth Symphony, premiered by these artists earlier this summer, may be dedicated to the monarch on her jubilee, but there is barely a bar in it that feels celebratory. Played without a break, the symphony unfolds darkly, before a brass sextet, seated above and to one side of the orchestra, introduces a succession of jaunty flourishes. These unleash a series of disintegrations and crises from which the remainder of the work seeks a fragile closure. It may not be Davies's most characteristic orchestral work, but it is indisputably one of his most engaged and it may well claim a lasting place in the repertoire.
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