Prom 62: Skride/Stagg/Maltman/ BBCSO/Young, Royal Albert Hall, review: 'A post-Schoenbergian world of rich, polyphonic textures'

Bayan Northcott is not only a distinguished critic but a fine composer, and a new piece from him is a rare and welcome event. His Concerto for Orchestra - amazingly, his first orchestral piece - is as meticulous and astutely discursive as his prose, yet reveals a volatile poetic sensibility. Wonderfully concise, inhabiting a post-Schoenbergian world of rich, polyphonic textures, it proved as Viennese in flavour as the contrasting Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 and Zemlinsky Lyric Symphony which followed in this inventively programmed Prom 62.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra played with brio under Simone Young; a conductor of longstanding international renown making her Proms debut at last. In the (surely gypsy, not "Turkish") Mozart, soloist Baiba Skride wrung proto-Romantic expression from cadenza to ample cadenza. While this bordered on over-sweet, the Zemlinsky was revelatory.

Now restless in love, now dissolving in separation and the ultimate peace of death, soprano Siobhan Stagg and baritone Christopher Maltman gave thrilling voice to Tagore's transcendent poems, set by a composer who has languished too long in the shadows of Mahler and Berg. Young oscillated sublimely between metaphysical twin poles, pivoting male and female around Zemlinsky's central 'Sprich zu mir, Geliebte'; this a near narcotic rapture at the music's yearning heart.

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