What if every concert was like this?

The Sinfonia of London and John Wilson are always in a class of their own - but even so, this Prom was almost ludicrously extraordinary...

I remember walking in at the end of a Sinfonia of London recording session seven years ago to interview John Wilson. The players were just packing up. About a third of them looked up and said, “Oh hi, Jess…”. The penny dropped. What? You’re playing in this? No wonder it sounds great!

And here they are again, ready for the packed-out Prom on Friday night: soloists on front desks, orchestra concertmasters halfway back, top quartet members up front, a cello soloist who comes back after the interval to lead his section, woodwind and brass playing to make you swoon. And a nightingale sang in the Albert Hall.

The Sinfonia of London and John Wilson acknowledge the applause (Photo by Tasmin Little)

On the podium is John Wilson, who isn’t only the most exciting conductor in the country, but also has the personal get-up-and-go to create this orchestra and make the whole thing happen. It takes some doing. Not every concert series would accept a second half consisting of the entire Respighi Roman Trilogy; not every concert series would be able to sell it; and not every orchestra would be able to play it, and certainly not like this. For the Proms, however, it’s perfect.

A curtain-raiser first half established the Italian theme with the overture to Verdi’s La forza del destino - though many of us still think of Provence when we hear it, thank you Manon des Sources. The languorous Walton Cello Concerto, with its introspective eloquence and glistening celesta, was written in Ischia for Gregor Piatigorsky in the mid 1950s and here everything was in evidence: the contrast of heat-haze and pizzazz, the softness and the brilliance, and soloist Jonathan Aasgaard brought out all its plangency and wisdom. (You may have seen his son, Thelo, scoring a goal for Norway on TV the other week.)

But Respighi? Where’s he been all our lives? The history of his repute is one of many whacked midcentury moles. Got on the wrong side of history around Mussolini? Mm-hm. (Whack.) Writing tonal music after 1912? Yup. (Whack.) Telling stories and sounding like a film score? Oh yes indeed. (Whack whack whack.) Died in 1936 without a hope in hell of postwar reassessment? Looks that way. (Whaaaack.)

How desperately uncool all that Roman scenery, whooping trombones, drunken revelry, twittering nightingale recording and tramping up the Via Appia might have looked from the depths of Darmstadt c1960. The programme’s ‘Previously at the Proms’ section, meticulously written by Richard Bratby, notes that although Fountains of Rome, the shortest of the three pieces, has had 25 performances there since 1922, 19 of them were between 1922 and 1957. It was not heard in this space even once between 1957 and 1995.

Frankly, the loss was theirs.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), as a young Italian viola player, went to work in Russia and while there was lucky enough to meet and study with Rimsky-Korsakov. If that extravagant orchestration seems highly coloured, it’s for the same reason Stravinsky could apply a seemingly limitless palette to The Firebird and Petrushka. The sheer imagination in the Roman Trilogy is almost bafflingly vast. You might hear hints of Russian-school affiliation, some sounds from Gregorian chant or Italian popular song, but these are used deliberately; it’s the virtuoso harmonic and timbral context in which he places them that is extraordinary.

One of the joys of sitting near the orchestra with a vivid side-view of Wilson is watching him pace and shape a crescendo. The extremes are much more pronounced than a normal orchestra would venture to create. It’s quite something to see a vast orchestra of well over 100 players right in front of you playing so quietly you can hardly hear them. And up they go, changing at first almost imperceptibly, through gestures that grow millimetre by millimetre and rise and rise until finally you’re swamped by a twenty-metre tsunami of sound. Pure magic. Except that it isn’t magic. It’s technique, obsessively honed by all concerned; it’s hard, hard work; it’s a lifetime’s mission in audible action. The great thing is that it is paying off.

Not being intimately acquainted with any of these tone-poems - but for an underwhelming encounter with somethingorother not long ago that sounded not remotely like this - I didn’t know the stories or the scenes. I have distance glasses and reading glasses, but can only wear one of them at a time, so if I can see the orchestra I can’t also read the programme notes. So I was left guessing as Wilson and his crack team leapt feet first into the Festivals.

WHAM - trumpets and drums galore. Palpably ancient Rome. The Colosseum. Gladiators. All we’re missing is Russell Crowe. Extraordinary sounds - gasps, roars, horrors, blood and gore and devastation - are unfolding through these sound waves. It’s like a DW Griffiths movie with a cast of thousands and vast production issues (anyone remember Good Morning Babylon, about the making of his Intolerance?) – except that with Respighi in 1928, everything is in colour. A look at the programme later revealed that I didn’t quite guess right. It’s Christians being thrown to the lions.

The Fountains, from 1915-16, is less radical, more Ravellian: softer and more fluid, obviously, but imposing at times too as it travels from sunset to midnight in Rome, visiting four of the city’s most famous water-features (in another era Respighi maybe could have won sponsorship from the Tourist Board). The Pines (1923-4) tends to be the favourite, and for a good reason: it holds the perfect balance of inspiration and adventure, affection and knock-em-dead orchestral marvels. And I do love a piece in praise of trees. The nightingale is written in, a recording to be played apparently from amid the violins, but just as enchanting was the high-set off-stage trumpet, soaring out from somewhere in the higher levels of the auditorium.

The cycle takes well over an hour, but when Wilson hopped back onto the podium, I’d have been happy for them to do the whole thing again as encore. Instead, they played the last bit of Rossini’s William Tell overture, galloping through the Alps at breakneck speed (my violinist companion for the evening was gripping her bow-arm in sympathetic agony). If you’ve got it, flaunt it - and the Sinfonia can do that. The Sinfonia can do anything.

We floated out at the end, taken out of ourselves and the daily anxieties and stresses, transported into something and somewhere better for the duration – notwithstanding the lions. In music, focusing on the moment, you live entirely in the present. Your problems vanish for a while; you feel energised and rejuvenated.. It’s tempting to say ‘that’s what it’s for’ - but music is ‘for’ many, many things and that is just one of them. It is, however, a good one.

What if every concert were always like this? Wouldn’t we all be at one every night if we could? We wouldn’t want to miss a single note.

Maybe it’s just as well that this isn’t the case. It would all seem too easy. Music is perhaps about aspiration, struggle and overcoming, as much as it is about rising above reality. You can’t rise above reality if you haven’t a fixed star to aim for, an internal image of what you want to create, that pushes you on to find the means to achieve it. It’s very, very rare that that attempt to reach the heights actually succeeds. If it wasn’t difficult, we wouldn’t get so much out of it. We would take it for granted, maybe forget that that level of excellence is not an everyday matter. There would be nothing to compare it to. As night defines day and darkness light, the polarities are essential. And without an occasional jackpot being struck like this, we wouldn’t know what it is that we’re working towards.

Onwards, and upwards, then, on the Via Appia.

Sundaynightis extravaganza

This week I’m looking forward to:

• Tomorrow’s Prom, 27 July: Tom’s last. Ed Gardner conducts the Strauss Alpine Symphony and Louise Alder sings Songs of the Auvergne. Yes please.

• Billy Budd at Glyndebourne on Tuesday 28 July.

• The fabulous violinist Alena Baeva plays the Korngold Concerto at the Prom on Thursday 30 July. Also includes Dobrinka Tabakova’s Orpheus’ Comet and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, with BBC Scottish under Delyana Lazarova.

• On Friday 31 July I am “in the box”: I’ll be spending the Prom interval in discussion live on Radio 3 with Georgia Mann talking about Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4. Who was right about that piece: Clara or Brahms? The concert includes the 1851 version with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen conducted by Omer Meir Wellber, and Daniel Lozakovich plays the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1.

I’m rather chuffed to learn that Schumann was short-sighted too. He had the same problem as me: if he could see his orchestra, he couldn’t read his score. And vice-versa. And in 1851 they hadn’t yet invented bifocals. That may be one reason he was not a better conductor.