Berlin Philharmonic/Petrenko review – insightful Elgar and Tchaikovsky holds Proms audience in thrall

The only potential disappointment about the first of their two Proms under their chief conductor Kirill Petrenko was that there were just two works. Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4 made an insightful pairing, though, sharing an autobiographical aspect that, in different ways, reveals much about their composers. The Elgar – bread-and-butter repertoire for UK orchestras but not yet for German ones – was approached with a freshness that made these portraits of the composer’s friends and family seem particularly affectionate.

The opening can sound like merely a warm-up for what’s to come; here, though, from the very start the string tone was sumptuous and pregnant with possibility, the phrasing meaningful. This attention to detail continued throughout a performance that gloried in the richness of the orchestra’s sound and the full extent of its range, from the softest of melancholy cello solos to the floor-shaking throb of the Royal Albert Hall organ in the finale. A particularly striking moment came with the stark timpani rolls in the penultimate variation, conjuring the sound of a ship’s engine to honour a friend who was then on a long sea voyage – or, reading deeper, perhaps a lost love who had emigrated years before.

There is no room for friends and family in the Tchaikovsky – just implacable Fate breathing down the composer’s neck during an especially turbulent time in his life. The Fate theme came at us like a juggernaut at the opening thanks to the Philharmonic’s outstanding brass section. This work was where Petrenko’s mastery of the long view paid off – in each movement Tchaikovsky’s repetitious figurations were sculpted into long lines that built and receded to create something huge.

The third movement had similar scope but came as a kind of light relief: its long passages of gossamer plucked strings were dispatched with pinpoint accuracy, and Petrenko seemed barely to need to conduct it at all. When Fate thundered back in to disrupt the finale, the quality of the silence in the pauses afterwards spoke volumes: this was an orchestra holding its audience in thrall.