An Ode to Olly

Much has been made in the current Proms season of superstar visits from Gustavo Dudamel and Nigel Kennedy – and quite right too, for apart from their mere presence in the Royal Albert Hall they have asked pertinent questions about the music they have been performing.

However there has not been so much noise about an especially valuable asset of British musical life, the conductor and composer Oliver Knussen, whose health happily appears to be much improved these days. His program for Prom 19 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of whom he is 'Artist in Association', was characteristically imaginative – and though given to a small audience it strongly emphasised his worth to music from the 20th century and beyond.

Listening again to this Prom on the radio, I was struck by Knussen's easy conversations with Petroc Trelawny about the music. He spoke about Honegger's love of trains before opening with Pacific 231, then the similarity of Pastorale d’été to the theme from Dr Finlay’s Casebook, and later on provided a revealing nugget of how he and the composer Henri Dutilleux were strolling along the sea front at Aldeburgh. After moments of silence Dutilleux looked at the sea and exclaimed, "This is the sea that Debussy had in mind when he wrote La mer."

Such revealing asides helped put the concert in greater context, as did the linking of several threads through the beautifully performed program. We had Alpine scenes from Honegger – unusually relaxed for a piece in the musically reactionary 1920s – and from Castiglioni, whose Inverno in-ver was an extraordinary piece of frostbitten cold for the upper registers of the orchestra, given a bright metallic glare through a battery of percussion.

Fascinating, too, was the vivid Bridge tone poem There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook, before the three songs on wine set by Berg to Baudelaire poems, Der Wein showing once again how Knussen and the soprano Claire Booth work so well together.

This was not the first time Knussen had produced a radical program, however – he has been thriving on these sorts of concerts for years. One of the highlights of the 2007 Proms season was his Rite of Spring, coupled with Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces , the world premiere of his Violin Concerto and Henze’s Sebastian im Traum . That same season he conducted the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, successfully reading the collective minds of the audience by repeating Webern’s Five Orchestral Pieces.

The point of these examples is to show that right now there is nobody quite so bold in their programming as Knussen – and his interpretations offer a composer’s insights to boot, often shedding new light on familiar music or revealing hidden masterpieces, as in the Castiglioni. To watch him conduct is to see somebody completely shunning the spotlight for the music’s sake – and the BBC Symphony Orchestra clearly get as much out of their partnership as he does. More power to his elbow!