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Petrenko, Ólafsson and the Berliner Philharmoniker dazzle in Schumann and Smetana

Bravo BBC! Prom after Prom has hit the heights this year, with only a few curveballs and oddballs along the way. Here’s another winner – and given that Saturday’s visitors were none other than the Berliner Philharmoniker under Kirill Petrenko, at the Royal Albert Hall for the first of two back-to-back concerts, a classic was always on the cards. So it proved in a pair of thrilling performances, neither of which bore any trace of the routine, that will live long in the memory.

The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson was wholly inside Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, and this interpretation was a pure meeting of minds between soloist, conductor and, in absentia, composer. The concerto is a popular warhorse of course, one we tend to classify as Romantic, but this spellbinding performance had more kinship with Mozart than it did with Grieg or Tchaikovsky.

After Schumann’s introductory flourish, Ólafsson’s piano answered the ensuing oboe melody with preternatural control – piano, gentle yet sturdy – and we were away. He played Schumann’s undulating sequences of notes like waves lapping on an island shore, while behind him Petrenko gauged internal balance flawlessly. The soloist’s tiny tenutos and micro-pauses were all echoed by the orchestra, so meticulously had the reading been prepared by one and all. At the movement’s end Ólafsson displayed dazzling pedal work in Schumann’s busy cadenza, while in the central Intermezzo (Andantino grazioso) the scrupulous pianist was very much in touch with his inner Wolfgang Amadeus. After an extrovert yet disciplined account of the Finale he cooled his muscles with a magical encore, the Adagio from Bach’s fourth Organ Sonata, as featured on his DG album of Bach transcriptions.

The exquisite serenity of that piece spilled over into Vyšehrad, the first of six symphonic poems that make up Smetana’s Má vlast. Petrenko, who in his undemonstrative way held the entire orchestra in his thrall, kept the music’s latent spectacle in his pocket so he could produce it with a bravura flourish later on. Even the composer’s dramatic cymbal clashes were reined in. The river Vltava flowed inexorably, its waves babbling as it pursued its course, and not until the third poem did the conductor loosen his reins in order to crash into the country rhythms and dances of Šárka. In a movement of mood swings and roundabouts; the Berliners gave it their all.

There was more babbling in From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields, but this time it represented the wind that rustles through trees. This piece is the cycle’s true climax and the Berliner Philharmoniker enchanted the audience with its hushed strings and lush clarinet melody. En route to the stirring climactic dance the orchestra plays an unmistakable ‘Amen’, and I always wish the cycle ended there. Not even Petrenko could disguise the fact that Smetana’s densely orchestrated and excessively busy conjoined movements Tábor and Blanik are low in inspirational wattage. Má vlast in four movements, like the Lemminkainen Suite of Sibelius or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade? That would do nicely. Alas, not even these august musicians may rewrite the history of music.