BBC Proms classical music brand sure to be a hit

Mixing the music from an Australian film about paper planes with a 19th-century French repertoire scores highly

Laura van der Heijden embraced pathos and sudden contrasts in the BBC Proms.

Introducing British classical music brand the BBC Proms into Australia is sure to be a commercial success, not least because the inaugural four-day sampler includes its own version of the Last Night’s famously rousing patriotic outbursts and singalong antics.

Artistically, can this 121-year-old British tradition be meaningfully franchised for global export? Or is presenting Australian orchestras under the Proms banner just opportune rebranding, pandering to lingering cultural cringe?

Certainly, this opening program with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra — under British chief conductor and long-time Proms participant Andrew Davis — delivered a satisfying, well-balanced program, with the MSO in typically fine form.

Opening with Dream of Flying, a stirring new work by Australian composer Nigel Westlake based on material from his recent score for the film Paper Planes, the program quickly slipped into 19th-century French repertoire.

Laura van der Heijden, the BBC Young Musician for 2012, embraced the pathos and sudden contrasts of Saint-Saens’s Cello Concerto No 1 before mild-mannered Davis turned to the passionate whirl of Berlioz’s lovesick Symphonie fantastique.

A distinctly Australian story about a country kid overcoming the tyranny of distance, Paper Planes gave Westlake scope to convey youthful optimism, fantasy, adversity, persistence and triumph. Dream of Flying preserves those threads and the score’s cinematic qualities: lush orchestration and luminous detail, sustained tension, heroic percussion and brass builds, dappled wind textures and restless string twittering. Beginning with an unpitched whoosh of air in the brass, Westlake captures the exhilaration of flight, twisting and turning from triumphant panoramic vistas to gossamer ascents, radiant blooms and joyful meditations.

At 19, van der Heijden reveals exceptional maturity. The Saint-Saens often suffers maltreatment, cellists slashing through tempests, then saturating delicate asides with ostentatious phrasing. Van der Heijden was having none of that, the beauty and clarity of her tone, even and sensitively weighted bow contact, and an unlaboured expressive palette making for an elegant performance. She gave fiendish double stops, harmonics and upper-register climbs the rare honour of being treated as musical ideas rather than tricks, making sense of what is generally rendered as acoustic porridge.

In a sturdy account of Symphonie fantastique, Davis luxuriated in Berlioz’s moments of high drama, while flitting lightly across more nuanced passages.

BBC Proms Australia: Prom 1. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Hamer Hall, April 13. BBC Proms Australia continues in Melbourne until Saturday.