Celebrating their centenary this year – all the more noteworthy since they nearly only made it to 99 – the BBC Singers’ Bristol Prom with conductor Sofi Jeannin featured a series of 10 works commissioned and premiered by them over the decades. From Britten to the brand new Losing the Lark by Asteryth Sloane, the variety and range underlined their exceptional musicianship. Unpredictable But Providential, former BBC Singer Judith Bingham’s playful exaltation of songbirds, was done tongue-in-cheek – soprano Emma Tring’s solo moments miraculously pitched as high as the sound of a hobby bird throughout the recital – while Ben Nobuto’s Blip was not so much sung as intoned, shouted, muttered and exhaled, subversive and witty.
John Pickard’s Mass in Troubled Times – taking its title from Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis, written during the Napoleonic wars – interleaves the familiar Latin with poems dealing with the plight of refugees fleeing their war-torn-countries, but whose ultimate fate is to drown. The Singers first performed the piece in 2019 and, with its implicit drama sustained compellingly over its 28 minutes, it was as moving and troublingly relevant now as then.
The centrepiece of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance in the main Beacon Hall was Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto, in which the soloist was Evelyn Glennie across an array of instruments, tuned and untuned. The exuberant, restless energy of the solo writing was mirrored by the BSO’s percussionists, their interaction creating exciting tensions and vibrancy, while Glennie’s cadenza-like drum-break came as a rhythmic frenzy. The audience responded in kind.
The BSO was also marking a milestone in this concert, namely the end of Kirill Karabits’s tenure as chief conductor, 15 years that have been an important time in the orchestra’s history but have also seen the quietly dynamic Karabits emerge as a musician of great insight and sensibilities. It spoke volumes that he should programme his fellow-Ukrainian Feodor Akimenko’s orchestral piece based on the Lermontov poem Angel, with its aura of heavenly song, together with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, grappling with the notion of fate or as the composer put it “the inscrutable predestination of providence”. Karabits’s reading of this was wonderfully incisive, with the orchestra playing with fervent lyrical feeling by way of tribute to him.
That the symphony had been prefaced by the Iranian-American Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s piece Knell – played at last December’s Nobel peace prize concert and invoking the resonance of a tolling bell – added a further symbolic layer. Its final reverberations were allowed to hang in the air, so that Tchaikovsky’s opening, following immediately, seemed to take on a new significance. It ensured that a celebratory occasion was also a deeply thoughtful one.
• Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September
