The performers for the Prom concert on July 28 were the BBC Scottish Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. The first piece, and, for a certain contingency, the most important was Earth Dances by Harrison Birtwistle. Written during 1985 and 1986, it is one of his major single movement pieces for large orchestra. The work features six strata, each with a characteristic intervallic “hierarcy,” register, and rhythmic characteristic. The interaction and progression of those strata, which defines its structure, produces a sense of a certain menacing quality and a sort of subterranean intensity, driving to a climax which Jonathan Cross in his program notes likened to that of the Sacrificial Dance in The Rite of Spring. The piece in the ends suggests that one might want to parse the title a little and consider whether it consists of an adjective and a noun or of a noun and a verb….or both simultaneously. In any case the piece has an almost overwhelming intensity which the performance vividly realized. It was followed by the Beethoven Third Symphony, also vividly realized.

The Prom on July 30 was advertised as being about the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto, with soloist Vadym Kholodenko, with no mention of the other two works on the program, Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra (1948) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1950-54) by Witold Lutosławski, or the orchestra involved, the BBC National Orcchestra of Wales, or of the conductor, Tadaaki Otaka. Certainly from a box office standpoint that seemed to have been a good move, since the hall was packed, and the arena was just about completely shoulder to shoulder. The concerto actually includes the piano so often in the orchestral texture that it can be overlooked, and many of the most striking moments are actually orchestral ones, and these stood out due to the really uniformly beautiful playing of the orchestra. Kholodenko’s own playing, with a beautiful sound and great nuance was really much more prominent in his encore, Rachmaninov’s Polka de VR.

The concert opened with Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra, written in 1948, which is a sort of mid-century take on the Baroque Concerto Grosso. It begins with a lean and rhythmically propulsive movement followed by an intense and haunting slow movement whose thicker and more varied texture introduces solo parts, which become even more important in the frolicsome final movement. Paul Griffith’s program notes on the Lutosìawski emphasized its composer’s difficulties as a modernist in the political situation of the time in Poland before that very modernism became a token of Poland’s separation if not independence, at least aesthetically, from the Soviet Union. Following in the footsteps of the Bartok Concerto for orchestra in it’s apparent use of folkie material and, at least ostensibly, more traditional tonal language, the Lutosìawski is dazzling in its orchestration and textural variety, especially in its final movement. The playing of the orchestra in the final work, as in the whole concert, was striking and memorable, for the unfailing beauty of sound, but most especially for the aptness of the quality of that sound for ever expressive moment.

In the past it was possible to hear these concerts on BBC Sounds anywhere in the world. This year they’re only available in the UK.