With Leonard Slatkin due to step down from his post as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in two years' time, the search for his successor has started. But there is no real need for the corporation to look beyond its own present roster. There are several possible homegrown candidates, but if an international name is regarded as essential then the BBCSO's principal guest conductor, the Czech Jiri Belohlavek, would seem to fit the bill perfectly. Not only does Belohlavek have the catholic tastes that the BBCSO needs for its highly varied repertory, he also brings a real distinctiveness to everything he conducts and puts together wonderfully satisfying programmes.
His pairing of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde at the Barbican was a beautifully judged juxtaposition. The two works are separated chronologically by exactly 10 years, the decade in which modernism changed the face of music completely. By the time Mahler completed his song-symphony in 1909, Schoenberg's own musical language had moved well beyond it into uncharted atonal territory.
Belohlavek's reading of Das Lied suggested that Mahler was well aware of where music was going in those years. Some interpreters treat the work as an exercise in wistful nostalgia, but here everything was raw and immediate. Detail was etched in bright, primary colours, occasionally threatening to overwhelm the soloists. The tenor really gets the short straw in this piece, but Keith Lewis only showed signs of strain in his final number, Der Trunkene im Frühling. The mezzo Petra Lang kept things cool and clipped in her first two songs, while Belohlavek crisply organised the textures around her (with a thrilling burst of extroversion in the middle of Von der Schönheit). She then offered the perfectly judged centre to the final Abschied, where the untethered woodwind lines were tellingly pungent, and even the final phrases were objective, never allowed to wallow.
Verklärte Nacht had been equally direct. Belohlavek presented the drama of this tone poem, based on Richard Dehmel's text, as if it were a piece of theatre, without ever neglecting its cogency as a sustained piece of musical architecture.
· This concert will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Thursday.
