Prom 30: Gabriel Prokofiev, Britten, Prokofiev (National Youth Orchestra, Jurowski, Grosvenor, DJ Switch)

Gabriel Prokofiev: Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra
Britten: Piano Concerto
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet (suite arr. Jurowski)

DJ Switch (turntables)
Benjamin Grosvenor (piano)

National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

Saturday, August 6
Royal Albert Hall, London
Prom 30

Cutting through the hubris of the night before to give an interestingly-programmed, excellently played, and thoroughly musical Prom, the National Youth Orchestra – as ever – surprised and surpassed high expectations in equal dose.

Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra hardly pushed the boundaries of what is possible in a concerto, but was very enjoyable. Using a turntable DJ (and, despite my age, I’m now out of my depth when it comes to technique) to sample, mix, amplify, chop up and otherwise distort and add to the orchestra, Prokofiev created a cohesive whole. Timbres and rhythms drift in and out of the texture, as does the DJ himself, who is given several unwritten cadenzas to justify this being a concerto rather than an orchestra with additional part for turntable. That one need make that distinction is testament to Prokofiev’s ability here to integrate the turntable, blurring boundaries precisely as it sounded, and using the vigour of the NYO – and other orchestras already – to great and seemingly natural effect.

I wondered at times whether the music for turntable itself did anything more than Steve Reich and those more interesting to have played with tapes (Cage – who actually wrote for turntables – Nono, etc.) have previously done, or indeed whether Thomas Adès hadn’t already gone further in integration in the ‘Ecstasio’ movement of Asyla (see here), but Prokofiev plays with different genres of dance music within the concerto and takes aim at stereotypes of young players too. The production here saw Jurowski on stage, leaning at the turntable as one suggesting a request might, and then jumping on to his podium, one hand in pocket, to begin (the NYO chatted amiably). The turntable samples violins – I have to say I smiled at the inclusion of a mobile phone on the recording – and so it winds its merry, Grime-inflected way. Drill master Jurowski interrupted the NYO’s mock bad behaviour to launch the second and third movements (‘Irreguluv’ and ‘Mälmo’), both of which saw an admirable continuation of an implicit beat, before DJ Switch‘s first cadenza, which seemed even to take aim at the Classical device of the trill leading into a tutti. Echoes of Stravinsky here were hard to miss. ‘Meditnow’, the Andante, played with disembodied micro-tonal sounds and tonal distortion sampling the winds, before the finale, ‘Snow Time’, seemed more Latin-infused and even gave way to jazzy moments in the brass. It all worked as both ‘classical’ and ‘dance’ music, verging at times close to something Prokofiev abhors (the idea of writing music specifically to bring young people to concerts), but never drifting into cliché.

Britten’s early Piano Concerto (1938, rev. 1945) worked surprisingly well alongside the Prokofiev concerto, and neither was served that badly by the comparison. Sounding blatantly like a mix of (Serge) Prokofiev and Ravel with the occasional blob of Rachmaninov thrown in for good measure, Britten’s concerto nonetheless proved admirably constructed and provided a good vehicle for the outstanding Benjamin Grosvenor – not that he used the concerto as such (he has more artistic taste already than many ‘stars’ twice his age). Grosvenor has a tone quite unlike anything I’ve heard before, pearly, full of expressive capability and confidence: it must be playing from another age. Fistfuls of notes were dispatched with complete ease yet interest, and colouration drifted from Prokofiev in the Toccata’s opening minutes to searing Debussy in the cadenza – and what glissandi! The distraught, distorted waltz seemed neither far from the oppression of Peter Grimes nor from occupied Vienna, and yet the still Impromptu (or rather passacaglia) third movement enchanted with dark premonitions, giving way to vicious percussive attack and lightning passagework in the March. After his Liszt on opening night and a first CD release of Chopin, Liszt, and Decca, Grosvenor seems to have the future sown up. But the future is not for the fainthearted, and one hopes that the perils of the modern music world don’t intrude. The future notwithstanding, Grosvenor is already an artist worth travelling to hear – in anything at all. Jurowski’s deeply-felt accompaniment (not that it was ever solely that) was also marvellous, as was the commitment of a slightly slimmed-down NYO. Grosvenor obliged with a rocky encore, Morton Gould’s Boogie Woogie Etude, a great favourite of none other than Shura Cherkassky.

Vladimir Jurowski’s suite from Romeo and Juliet – about 50 minutes long – opens not with the work’s introduction but the searing, semi-resolving dissonances of the seventh number, ‘The Prince Gives his Order’. From then on, Jurowski presented a fearsomely lush maelstrom of a reading, vigorous in the central numbers but starkly contrasting the lighter super-Tchaikosvky moments with stormier times. There was nothing not to love here, even intimations of Prokofiev’s grandson. All sections of the orchestra distinguished themselves, though especially leader Thomas Aldren (playing with restraint wholly absent from the SBSO leader’s solos the previous evening), flautist Rosie Bowker, and principal trumpet Malachy Frame. Some entries were a little amiss, but the nobility of the final scenes, delivered on a grand scale, was utterly convincing and totally in line with that brassy opening’s foreboding. Many members of the orchestra were in tears by Juliet’s demise, and rightly so. I had expected Jurowski to give a more consciously pointy reading, but was very glad he did not: whether one could have danced to many of the more rapid sections, I know not. But that was completely irrelevant in the end.

You can listen again for 7 days here, and the concert will be shown on BBC Two on August 13 (and thereafter on iPlayer). Or rather, you should listen again.