American minimalism can punch and thrill, hypnotise and slow your pulse, but how often does it make you laugh? What a brilliant idea, then, from Kazuki Yamada and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to pair John Adams’ formative 1980 epic Harmonium – a sonic wrestle with love and death and desire – with music by the wittiest, slipperiest, most self-puncturing composer in the business, an artist who will break your heart with the cheekiest of grins: Francis Poulenc.
It’s entirely typical that Poulenc can’t even bring himself to call a symphony a symphony. Any delusions of grandeur are seen off at the pass by diminutising his 1948 “Sinfonietta”, which duly unfolds in a series of impeccably shaded and textured dances, marches and melodies that thumb their nose at anything so dutiful as development.
Lucid and urbane, Yamada’s Poulenc was impeccable – a crisp musical suit, an Hermès pocket-square of whimsy just visible in silky woodwind solos and harp, always undercut by clean architectural lines. When the music has this many punchlines you have to play it absolutely straight; all the more essential, because there was a riotous coda to come in the form of Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos.
Dutch duo the Jussen brothers (who’ve been playing this since they were teenage prodigies) bounded on for their Proms debut in matching suits and flung themselves at this naughty musical satire – whose target is modernism as much as a Mozart piano concerto – with irrepressible rhythmic energy. Two heads nodded vigorously from either side of the stage, fingers flying absolutely as one: enormously stylish fun.
A performance of Harmonium at home in Birmingham a few weeks ago lacked choral welly, but with the CBSO Chorus now bolstered by the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs we had the rippling textural canvas the Adams demands for this quasi-choral-concerto – voices treated as pulsing points of light in Negative Love; as an explosive, ululating jangle in Wild Nights. Central movement Because I could not stop for Death was the only sticking point, sagging where it should have held us rapt. But to demand electricity here is rather like asking for more pace in mile 22 of a marathon – a quibble in a frankly monumental achievement.
• Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.
