Prom 20: Kuusisto / BBCSSO / Dausgaard review – strikingly unusual twists

Royal Albert Hall, London
A new take on Sibelius is played with tremendous conviction by the Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Sibelius’s violin concerto and his Fifth Symphony are among his most admired and frequently performed works. So Thomas Dausgaard and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra could easily have left it at that for their Saturday evening Prom programme. This being the Proms, however, they offered two strikingly unusual twists.

The more substantial was to play the Fifth Symphony in its original 1915 version rather than the familiar final 1919 revision. Remarkably, given that Osmo Vänskä made a pioneer recording of the original score in 1995, this was the first time that the earlier version has ever been performed in this country. Once heard, however, it transforms one’s view of the final work. Dausgaard and the BBCSSO played it with tremendous conviction.

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