Vaughan Williams's rapt idyll, The Lark Ascending, is not the most obvious chart-topper but earlier this year it beat Rachmaninov into second place in Classic FM's Hall of Fame. And there's little doubt it helped fill the hall for this concert of English music.
The Lark Ascending is actually rather more than a simple pastoral reverie: written on the eve of the First World War, it can seem retrospectively like an elegy for a passing age. And it was this sense of pathos alongside the lyrical that made Janine Jansen’s reading so special.
The ballet Job is one of VW’s finest scores and, despite some wayward wind tuning, the orchestra did it justice under Oramo’s direction, Job’s comforters being portrayed by a suitably oleaginous saxophone solo from Martin Robertson.
William Alwyn’s First Symphony had not been heard at the Proms for more than 60 years but that neglect was surely not a straightforward matter of conventional tonality falling foul of modernism. Alwyn was a successful film composer and the problem with this work is that while much of the material is decked out in glorious Technicolor, there’s a palpable lack of symphonic rigour. One can hardly blame Oramo for trying to inject more profundity than the work can bear.
The BBC Proms run until Sept 13 (bbc.co.uk/proms).
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