United Kingdom BBC Proms 2025 [1] – Shostakovich, Ravel, Walton: Nicholas McCarthy (piano), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra / Mark Wigglesworth (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London 20.7.2025. (CK)
Shostakovich – Suite for Variety Orchestra (arr. Atovmyan)
Ravel – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
Walton – Symphony No.1
When Mark Wigglesworth conducted his inaugural concert as Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra last November, the main works were the Ravel (with the same soloist) and Walton listed above. Those performances were mightily impressive (review here): but the BBC Proms are something special, and every musician on stage rose to the occasion.
Wigglesworth has long experience and impeccable credentials in the music of Shostakovich (he and the orchestra will open their autumn season with the Tenth Symphony). None of that was really needed for the eight short movements cobbled together from Shostakovich’s film and stage music by his friend Levon Atomyan as a Suite for Variety Orchestra: nevertheless Wigglesworth conducted with real affection, coaxing toe-tapping precision from his expanded forces, including quartets of horns, saxophones, trumpets and trombones, harp, piano (four hands), celesta, accordion, guitar and lots of percussion. The largest orchestra of the night for the flimsiest musical fare: but if it is to be done, the Proms are the place to do it. The players were right on their toes, and the audience of thousands was duly delighted.
Nicholas McCarthy’s performance of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was almost upstaged by the warmth of feeling and the sense of occasion engendered by the fact that he was only the second left-handed pianist to play it at the Proms, after Paul Wittgenstein, who commissioned it, in 1951: the first, one might argue, since Wittgenstein disliked the work and modified it in performance to his own liking.
McCarthy and Wigglesworth paid full attention to the work’s sinister side, from its pitch-black opening on contrabassoon to its hard-edged, jazz-inflected glare (Michael Steinberg has called it ‘a singularly impressive distillation of the dark Ravel’): but my abiding memory is of the affecting beauty and stillness of McCarthy’s handling of the solo piano’s quieter and more reflective passages. The Prommers took him to their hearts; he spoke to them – and us – simply and engagingly before giving us an iridescently beautiful performance of Scriabin’s Nocturne, written when he was 18, when over-practising had given him tendonitis in his right hand, rendering him temporarily left-handed.
After the interval Walton’s First Symphony was given a superbly gripping performance, one in which its symphonic weight counted for more than its surface brilliance. The opening was full of tension and rhythmic unease: the horns, the oboe, and beneath them the violins, their rustling so quiet and so precise they could have been tiny percussion instruments. I have not really felt before how full this opening movement is, not only of tension, but of anger: desolation, too, in the slower section, as Tammy Thorn’s bassoon opened up an emotional wasteland. The baleful entry of growling horns and tuba built towards something so colossal, and so implacable, that I was reminded of Yeats’s apocalyptic rough beast (in The Second Coming), harbinger of an age of cruelty and violence, with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, moving its slow thighs as it slouches towards Bethlehem to be born. If that sounds like the pretension of a retired English teacher (which I am), my apologies: but the performance really was that powerful.
The anger palpably continues beneath the whiplash Presto and converts to anguish in the Andante: the BSO dealt superbly with the sharply pointed rhythms of the former (stretched tight, it seemed in this performance, over a vast emptiness), and the bleak lyricism of the latter – the woodwind chorus, led by Anna Pyne’s flute, denying the strings’ vain struggle to find the beginnings of warmth.
After an uncommonly searching account of the first three movements, how would the finale sound? After the initial pomp and circumstance, the strings found a sinewy energy, an extraordinary lightness of touch: almost akin to the Presto but generating excitement and expectation – joy, even – rather than malice. The launch of the fugue was featherlight, airborne.
It is exciting to see the second timpanist take up his sticks and the other percussionists get to their feet, and the endgame was thrilling: yet Paul Bosworth’s sensitively interpolated trumpet lament seemed almost to suggest an alternative narrative, one more in keeping with the thrust of the first three movements. It is swept away in the overwhelming excitement of the symphony’s majestic conclusion: yet the tension is there too, right up to the final bar.
It was a performance in which every player gave his or her all: but the Bournemouth strings deserve special mention. They were extraordinary. I headlined my review of the November performance ‘a bright future beckons’. It seems to have already arrived.
Chris Kettle
Featured Image: Mark Wigglesworth conducts the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms 2025 © Chris Christodoulou/BBC
Chris – thank you for a very fine and insightful review of the wonderful prom I enjoyed so much last Sunday. You obviously know the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra very well – they were superb under the direction of Mark Wigglesworth. Ravel’s Piano Concerto for LH was the main focus for my attendance. Your summary of Nicholas McCarthy’s performance certainly resonates with me. I was bold over by his control of the piano sound which enabled him to sing out the distinctive melodic phrases so sensitively from the demanding textures of the piano score. The Scriabin Nocturne encore was the highlight of the evening for me – absolutely magical and very memorable.
It’s the Scriabin that has stayed with me too, Angela.
Angela, the penny has just dropped – we were sitting next to each other. It was a pleasure to meet you, especially as we discovered that I had heard you bimm-bamming for Boulez in Mahler 3 half a century ago – 20 November 1974, to be precise, with Yvonne Minton as mezzo soloist.
Indeed! I really enjoyed meeting you. That was incredibly impressive that you were able to instantly tell me the exact date and year of the Boulez Mahler 3 I bim-bammed in many moons ago! Wonderful to think you were in the audience.
I’m really disappointed that I am unable to go to the Mahler 3 Prom as I am on holiday. So my next Prom is another Ravel/Shostakovich combo with Benjamin Grosvenor at the keyboard on the 15th.
Look forward to reading further reviews of yours. All the best.
I found the Walton performance rather hobbled, particularly the last movement. Wigglesworth could not find the impetus the work requires. The ending should leave you with a sense of raptured exhaustion rather than mild satisfaction.
Reginald, I wonder if you heard John Wilson’s Proms performance with the Sinfonia of London a couple of seasons ago. That was more overtly dramatic and theatrical. Nothing beats the old Previn recording, but I felt the Bournemouth performance had an intensity of its own.