Sinfonia of London and John Wilson deliver five-star excellence

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★★★★★This all-American Prom was all-round excellent — but, boy, the way the Sinfonia of London played John Adams’s Harmonielehre was something else. The Prommers immediately erupted at its triumphant end, a heartfelt response to an unforgettable performance. The playing was so virtuosically good that, paradoxically, I almost forgot that’s what was happening. The musicians gave us a hotline straight to the composer, cutting right to the heart of the piece.
And I don’t think I’ve heard the angst of Adams’s 1985 symphony-in-all-but-name ever drawn out so strongly, its existential questioning beautifully set up by Ives’s brief yet powerful The Unanswered Question, with strings and trumpet ethereally floating above us from the galleries. Just as the conductor John Wilson brilliantly captured the bitter bite of Walton at last year’s Proms and the searing intensity of Korngold at his orchestra’s debut three years ago, here he leant into Adams’s dark undercurrents. Not only in The Anfortas Wound, that anguished second movement haunted by Sibelius and Mahler, but in the first movement too. The spirit of its implacable opening E minor chords lingered on. After such emotional intensity, the arrival of the luminous finale, with its glinting flutes, piccolo and celesta, was all the more impactful.
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Elsewhere, we had a bumper line-up of the US’s greatest 20th-century hits. Even if Wynton Marsalis’s bold, brassy Herald, Holler and Hallelujah! was premiered in 2022, its unabashed nods to Copland, jazz and swing bands firmly place its artistic sympathies in an earlier era. We headed out into the Wild West for the suite from Copland’s ballet Billy the Kid, a folksy soundscape inspired by the legendary outlaw, played with spick-and-span efficiency, plenty of colour and a particularly vivid percussion gun battle. Then it was time for a shot of pure emotion, every drop of expressive eloquence wrung out of Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
For some listeners, the main event will no doubt have been Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, its signature clarinet glissando gloriously stretched out like a blissed-out cat in sunshine. This was a performance of bustling urban energy, contrasting up-tempo urgency with lush tunes, held together by a classy soloist, Steven Osborne. His solo encore, a transcription of Duke Ellington’s Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, was deliciously cool and spontaneous, a real moment to savour.Available on BBC Sounds
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