Landscape has been a persistent theme in these Proms, and such a focus would have been incomplete without the inclusion of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. With just two concerts to go in the season it was duly brought to the Albert Hall on Thursday by the London Symphony Orchestra and its principal conductor, Colin Davis.
Nature bound the whole programme together: Beethoven's rural idyll was preceded by works by two composers who have long been close to Davis's heart, though Sibelius's penultimate tone poem The Oceanides is more seascape than landscape, and more an abstract exploration of orchestral sonorities than a depiction of the sea nymphs of Greek mythology. That was clear from the LSO's performance, which spiralled vertiginously from the prancing flutes and harp glissandi of the opening to the stratospheric string writing of the climax, all wrought in a single, unbroken arc.
The Rose Lake, Tippett's last major work, sets much harder problems of coherence - perhaps insuperable ones, for it is one of those pieces that become less convincing at every encounter. It was composed for the LSO and Davis, but even his faith in the music cannot disguise the lameness of some of the imagery in this evocation of a lake in Senegal - whether it's the alternation of a loping marimba with brittle woodwind chords, the unsubtle fusillades of roto-toms, or the rather aimlessly yearning string writing.
What the performance did share with the other works was Davis's care with the detail, which was as manifest as his confident, unswerving grip on the architecture in every movement of the Pastoral Symphony. Nothing was forced or rushed, yet nothing lingered either. Davis's Beethoven is utterly traditional, without even a hint of modern period-performance ideas, yet it has a strength, integrity, and sheer good musical common sense, whether unfolding the first movement at a natural walking pace, or judging the onset of the storm and the relaxation of its aftermath exactly.
• This Prom will be broadcast on Radio 3 on September 21.
