Though nothing at all by Olivier Messiaen was heard at the Proms until 1962, almost all his major works have been played there in the past half century. But the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s visit with its music director Peter Oundjian still managed to begin with a piece never heard before at the summer season of concerts: the 12-minute Hymne that Messiaen composed in 1932, the year in which he began work on one of his most famous pieces, L’Ascension. The score of Hymne was lost during the second world war and Messiaen rewrote it from memory in 1947. It’s a strange work, a frieze-like succession of mostly extrovert ideas, which reveals more of where Messiaen’s music had come from – Franck, Debussy and Ravel, Bartók and Stravinsky (perhaps filtered through Roussel) – than of where it was going.
Oundjian and his orchestra played it competently, though without the really stylish enthusiasm that might have made it seem more than an interesting period piece. He and the RSNO have been together long enough now for something beyond comfortable familiarity to have developed between them. But there was little sense of a spark here, nor any suggestion of more than a routinely effective performance in Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the end of the evening. Each section of the symphony was convincingly moulded, though the textures really needed a plumper cushion of string sound on which to sit. Except in the finale, which did seem more coherent, there was nothing that joined the parts together, and climaxes such as that of the elegiac Adagio seemed to arrive out of nowhere, without real preparation or context.
In between these pieces, Igor Levit was the soloist in Mozart’s last piano concerto, K595 in B flat. He played it with pearly delicacy, creating a lyrical web that seemed as if it might blow away at any moment, and which was sometimes overpowered by the orchestral woodwind. It didn’t plumb all the emotional depths, but it was most beautifully wrought.
• Available on BBC iPlayer until 2 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.
