Music review: Prom 19: The BBC SSO and Alexander Melnikov, Royal Albert Hall, London

EVERYBODY knows the opening of Strauss’s tone-poem Also sprach Zarathustra: a low rumble on the double basses, a climbing brass fanfare, a triumphant clarion call in the minor key, then the same sequence repeated in the major. Yes, we’re in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Alexsander Melnikov

Prom 19: The BBC SSO and Alexander Melnikov, Royal Albert Hall, London ****

But then we are off on a vertiginous musical journey which is designed to evoke the stages of mankind’s development as imagined by the eccentric philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and in Prom 19 Thomas Dausgard and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra led us through it with thrilling authority.

Next came a performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor which got more deeply under the skin of that lovely work than any I had heard before. Schumann wrote it in the knowledge that the piano concerto form had reached a perfection with Mozart and Beethoven which could never be surpassed; he wanted to create a work in which the orchestra would be no mere spectator of pianistic virtuosity, and in this concerto he achieved a marvellous new blend to which the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov brought his characteristically sensitive touch. This performance was at once gracefully companionable and full of insights and surprises, and is well worth checking out on the BBC i-player.

The finale was Sir James MacMillan’s now-classic tone-poem The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. For the composer this work is ‘the Requiem that Isobel Gowdie never had’, as it traces her torture and martyrdom. The i-player may not be equipped to convey the scale of MacMillan’s massively dramatic effects, but it will reflect the brilliance of the BBC SSO.

MICHAEL CHURCH