Hilary Finch
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For one single day the sun blazed. Magnus Lindberg's new orchestral work (written last year, at the request of Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic) was brought to the Proms for its UK premiere by the Oslo Philharmonic. Seht die Sonne (Behold the Sun - a tribute to Schoenberg's Gurrelieder) has no programme as such, but it seems to incarnate the energy of the sun itself.
Lindberg's large-scale orchestral works always come into their own in the vast space of the Albert Hall. From the opening brass chords, in a luminescent C major, to the final dying fall, this 30-minute span of incandescent invention is one of Lindberg's greatest wonders. The ear is focused by short, rising figures and bluesy, falling phrases; and the spirit is lifted by Lindberg's characteristic shifting timbres - first to a frenzy of bowing strings, then to an explosion of sun-spots in a woodwind scherzo - then on to luxuriant string chords so warm that you want to bathe in them. The music coalesces, rises to countless climaxes (there's an accelerando on almost every other page of the score) and disperses again in meteor showers of notes. Just when you think you've heard it all, a solo cello rises in spectral harmonics and plays a little concertino with the lower strings. Jukka- Pekka Saraste conducted with the confidence, bright detail and authority of the score itself.
The Lindberg - and an exuberant First Symphony of Sibelius - framed Nikolai Lugansky's performance of Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto: deliciously fleet-fingered, tough and percussive by turn. After the Sibelius, stomping feet demanded an encore, and Saraste obliged with a Hardanger Melody by Geirr Tveitt, and sweet song and bucolic dance from Grieg's Peer Gynt.
The warm atmosphere of this concert could not have been in greater contrast to the chill virtuosity of the New York Philharmonic the night before. Lorin Maazel conducted Ravel, Bartók and Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony with a fusion of driven energy and cold control, which was both expressively reductive and musically debilitating.
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