Is it bad etiquette to give an encore that upstages the main work? The a cappella vocal group the Swingles raised the question by following The Gorgeous Nothings, the work they had co-commissioned from the composer Anna Clyne for this Prom, with their whirling, beatboxing arrangement of a Bulgarian folk tune, Bučimiš.
This party piece made one wish The Gorgeous Nothings had more consistently taken flight. In seven, harmonically rooted short movements plus a framing prologue and epilogue, it sets some of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems – fragments jotted on paper scraps, unformed yet offering fertile imagery. A reference to birds in one text brought an idyllic passage with the three female singers almost resembling Disney songbirds; meanwhile, a percussionist spun a bicycle wheel with a playing card clipped to one of its spokes, making a noise like the wings of a giant hummingbird.
The prologue had opened with a childlike soprano solo expanding into something almost like a Tudor anthem, with the seven amplified voices seeming to come from all around. The players of the BBC Philharmonic, too, were miked so that their sounds could be manipulated by Jody Elff, providing the electronic processing from the back of the arena. Some effects were fleetingly spellbinding, as if one were touching one’s finger into a reflection of the sound in water, and watching the image scatter. Others might have more magical impact in a less grand venue: there seemed little point in tweaking the orchestra to sound like an organ when the country’s second-largest real organ was sitting metres away, unused.
Nothing upstages Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. It’s a sprawling, often overpowering work – at times it feels as if you’d stared at a blinding light shaped like Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and then hopped on to a roundabout with your eyes closed. Yet the conductor Nicholas Collon took every opportunity he could find to keep it light on its feet, letting the sine-wave arabesques of the ondes Martenot, played by Cynthia Millar, flavour the music rather than overpower it, and keeping the strings’ luscious, sugared swoops secondary to the dazzlingly rhythmic piano acrobatics of Steven Osborne.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The Proms continue until 14 September.
