Festival tries to avoid controversial statements, but Russian-German pianist Igor Levit sneaked European Union theme through in first hour of season

The BBC has been known to go to some lengths to avoid political statements being made at the Proms, but this year, pianist Igor Levit sneaked one in before even an hour of the season had passed.

The Russian-German pianist’s encore – demanded in no uncertain terms by the audience after his performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 – was Liszt’s transcription of the Ode to Joy, the chorus to hopeful words by Friedrich Schiller that forms the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 9.

It is also, of course, the anthem of the European Union, and a worldwide musical symbol of assertive unity. If there could have been any doubt that a performer of such political awareness and responsibility as Levit meant it to be taken as such, he was wearing a small EU pin. The BBC’s cameras couldn’t miss it.

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The concerto had been deeply involving, a performance of memorably quiet intensity. Conductor Edward Gardner led the BBC Symphony Orchestra off at a brisk pace, lifting the end of each phrase; the playing was charged and snappy, the spring coiled tight.

The abruptly rising scales with which Levit eventually announced his presence were fiery and emphatic, but as the performance continued, what was striking was its quiet focus.

In the first movement there were long passages where Levit hung back, never entirely disappearing, yet throwing the wind soloists into the spotlight – and leaving himself space for a rip-roaring crescendo towards the end. He waited to begin the slow movement, searching for a silence almost unachievable in such a huge hall.

Here was the heart of the piece – and here was a performance of an intimacy that should be almost impossible in this space. Hunched over the keyboard, Levit dialled the volume further and further back, drawing us in with him.

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When the opening music returned and the orchestra supplied the answering phrase, the effect was magical. And Levit and the orchestra together relished the mercurial swerves of the finale, with elegance and sly wit.

The Proms always open with something brand-new. St John’s Dance, by the not-quite-30-year-old composer Tom Coult, is a five-minute piece inspired by medieval reports of a mysterious contagious disease that made its sufferers dance until they collapsed.

After an arresting opening – a single violin glassily seesawing between two notes, rich with overtones – the piece hurtles through several mini-dances, with woody tuned percussion, chattering winds and weighty thumps that bring to mind Stravinsky’s Kashchey from The Firebird; together, they conjure up the feeling of being trapped in repeated motion from which there is no escape. It’s a work of desperate yet joyous rhythmic drive.



That drive found its apotheosis after the interval in a work that launched a major 2017 Proms thread: the music of John Adams in the year of his 70th birthday.

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In Harmonium, written in 1981, words by John Donne and Emily Dickinson are used almost as textural building blocks in a huge choral edifice.

The forces of the BBC Symphony Chorus were lent an extra, youthful edge by the teenagers of the BBC Proms Youth Choir, and under Gardner’s firm direction, Adams’s pulsing sonorities glowed and throbbed like something truly alive.

The First Night is always meant to be a celebration of some kind, but it doesn’t often get to be as affirmative as this.