Prom 67: Simon Bolivar/ Dudamel,Royal Albert Hall, review: 'Enormous verve'

Every time Gustavo Dudamel brings his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra to London, they get a bit better. This time they opened with a charming new work entitled Hipnosis Mariposa by the Venezuelan cellist-composer Paul Desenne. But their piece de resistance was a performance at the proms of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras No 2, which allowed the virtuosi in the orchestra’s ranks to shine one by one – notably flute, cello, tenor sax, and trombone. But the whole ensemble dispatched this brightly-coloured work with enormous verve; if their account of Ravel’s La valse was less than perfectly coordinated, blame Dudamel. For their encore they transformed themselves into a village band, getting a tumultuous response.

That our repertory of nineteenth-century bel canto operas is steadily growing is almost entirely thanks to the Opera Rara Company, which has been dusting off and recording forgotten works for forty years. With Mark Elder conducting a brilliant bunch of soloists, plus the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Opera Rara Chorus, Rossini’s Babylonian tragedy Semiramide emerged in all its multi-faceted magnificence. Space doesn’t permit me to itemize individual excellences, beyond saying that Albina Shagimuratova’s delicately-inflected incarnation of the title role was the most perfect coloratura performance I have ever heard at the Royal Albert Hall.