Proms 8 & 9: CLS/Hickox, MacMillan premiere

4 / 5 stars
/ Royal Albert Hall, London

Mendelssohn's Antigone may best be described as a classical tragedy recast as a secular passion play. Written in 1841 for the German premiere of Sophocles's tragedy, the score forms an early attempt at recreating the fusion of music and speech that formed Greek drama.

The choruses are set for two male voice choirs. The actors declaim over orchestral accompaniment. The end result is curious but potent, as Wednesday's late night Prom proved, when the work was performed in a staging by Eugenia Arsenis, with Richard Hickox conducting the City of London Sinfonia and the BBC Singers.

Mendelssohn's inspiration was fuelled by Mozart and Bach and the choruses peer back through the rituals of The Magic Flute to the chorales of the St Matthew Passion with their combination of simplicity, profundity and immediacy.

Woodwind pastorales convey Antigone's nostalgia for life in the face of death, while rigid marches underpin Creon's progress towards catastrophe. Zoe Waites was a dignified Antigone, calmly confronting Brian Protheroe's psychologically imploding Creon.

Conducting and choral singing were both electric, and the play itself - dealing with the silencing of dissent in times of war - has rarely seemed more relevant than now.

'Silence', meanwhile, is the subtitle of James MacMillan's theological Third Symphony, given its European premiere last night by the BBC Philharmonic, with MacMillan conducting.

Drawing on a novel by the Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo, the symphony attempts to explain the seeming absence of God in times of human suffering, his silence a continuous reminder of his silence towards his incarnate son during the Crucifixion.

Unfortunately, you need the musical equivalent of Dostoevsky to get this to work. MacMillan offers us a palindrome that passes from silence to anguish and back. The sonorities are ravishing, but much of it generates a sense of deja vu.

Oriental woodwind curlicues recall Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The central climax sounds awkwardly like the music Berg provides for Jack the Ripper in Lulu. None of it approaches the profundity with which the atheist Richard Strauss contemplated the final silence of death in his Four Last Songs, which followed, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda and sung by Barbara Frittoli.

After the interval, Noseda, who has the stuff of genius in him, hurled himself into Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, in a performance that bristled and burnt with an almost Toscanini-ish intensity.