Confusion over our seat allocation saw me negotiating with the press officer for one more ticket and I ended up at the end of row 8 in area G, practically in the percussion section of the BBC Philharmonic. And this was really the place to be for a unique perspective on Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. The man with the gong was practically standing next to me!Argie-born Nelson Goerner was at the piano with Vassily Sinaisky conducting. Like his orchestra he was in a white tux and looked a bit like a Maitre D in a grand French hotel. The Philharmonic are Manchester based and most of them were outside puffing away during the interval.
The second half was taken up with Reinhold Glière's bloated third symphony, Ilya Muromets. Oh God...Eighty minutes! I heard someone writing it off as 'unstructured' when we were leaving the Royal Albert Hall, but in fact it has a very clear dramatic line. This is myth-making music imagined in the last years before the arrival of cinema.
The highlight of the evening was Arvo Pärt's Cantus en memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), an ethereal piece which descends along on an A minor spiral, apparently a seminal example of what the composer calls his tintinnabuli technique:
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