Music review: Prom 6: Nicola Benedetti, BBC NOW and Thomas Søndergård
Prom 6: Nicola Benedetti, BBC NOW and Thomas Søndergård *****
Royal Albert Hall, London
The other turning point in her life, she said, lay in the way her playing had matured: Prom 6, in which she was to play Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No 1 in A minor, would be the proof of that. And it was. Her one perennial weakness has been a failure to project her tone, but as she launched into the opening of the first movement her sound was both exceptionally clean and powerfully projected; supported by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Thomas Sondergard, she brought a wonderful serenity to this dreamy nocturne. Her playing in the demonic Scherzo had punch and precision, and in the Burlesque a contagious exuberance; she brought ravishing beauty to the Passacaglia, with the cadenza taking the breath away through its sheer perfection as her angular intervals climbed ever higher into the stratosphere. Her encore – an arrangement of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ by her friend Petr Limonov – had great charm.