Prom 65

Prom 66

Prom 67

On Friday the Nash Ensemble took us back to the future with the American George Crumb, whose music 40 years ago heralded a new world of wonder. Here were pieces inspired by the 1969 Moon landing and the song of humpbacked whales, then a recent discovery. Here were players wearing masks, hitting Tibetan prayer stones, singing into a piano’s innards — the music-theatre tricks of those times.

If Crumb’s music just scraped along with a bag of tricks he’d only deserve a museum pedestal, alongside tie-dyed kaftan and love beads. But the Nash Ensemble, conducted by Diego Masson, revealed his genuine imagination and lyric fire, especially in Ancient Voices of Children, one in a loose cycle of works inspired by the beauty and violence of Lorca’s poetry. Claire Booth was on volcanic good form singing into Ian Brown’s piano. Philippa Davies’s flutes and Paul Watkins’s cello made equally effective contributions to the more decoratively beauty of Night of the Four Moons and Vox balaenae.

Other voices of children had surfaced earlier in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the most curious exhibit in a middling concert from the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, of high renown, conducted by Jonathan Nott. In Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, Nott’s “safety first” motto led to a timid interpretation: why conduct Strauss if you don’t let him go over the top? But the Kindertotenlieder problems lay primarily with Matthias Goerne, who had left his emotional feelings at his hotel. Here were monotone shades and frozen expression, the voice only reaching heat and trembling in the penultimate song’s climax. Any musical life came from the orchestra, who soft-pedalled the tragedies but certainly lavished us with tender hues, exact ensemble, and crisp turns of phrase.

Depths were also skirted in Saturday’s Prom with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Under their conductor Jac van Steen, Dvorák’s New World Symphony had that sliced-bread feeling: bright, neatly sliced, nominally nutritious.

Tastier eating came with John McCabe’s recent horn concerto, subtitled Rainforest IV, with that fine soloist David Pyatt. The score was strongest in the slow, atmospheric “forest” sections; weaker when the urban world broke in with fast, stiffer rhythms. Pyatt didn’t escape the horn player’s occupational hazards; but no cracked note lessened his mellifluous beauty, or the friendly craftsmanship of McCabe, a contemporary composer who actually communicates.

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