A lively showcase for a great central European orchestra at the Proms

As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European guest orchestras. First up was the Czech Philharmonic playing Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Jakub Hrusa before moving on to Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass the following night. These grand, glittering monuments of Czech music were garnished with a couple of relative rarities – Dvorak’s Piano Concerto, played by Mao Fujita, and the Military Sinfonietta, composed in 1937 by (the then 22-year-old) Vitezslava Kapralova, who died at the age of 25.

It’s unmistakably the work of a young composer. Xylophone? Bring it on

Kapralova’s composition is a captivating thing, starting out with fanfares and strutting march rhythms before proceeding to, well, pretty much anything you can imagine. It’s unmistakably the work of a young composer; there’s that gleeful, kid-in-a-toyshop energy, with ideas and colours flying in all directions. Xylophone? Bring it on. What if the violins played the main theme on harmonics? Only one way to find out! It’s the composer’s superabundant imagination, rather than any more formal process, that makes the Military Sinfonietta so compelling – and in the light of her unfulfilled promise, so poignant.

It certainly made a lively showcase for the sound of this great central European orchestra. It’s easy to fall back on national clichés when talking about an orchestra’s character: almost involuntarily, I found my head filling with notions of woodsmoke and afternoon sunlight as those mellow yet penetrating woodwinds carolled through veils of muted strings, with a solo violin glinting high above. Such lovely individual elements; sounds to roll over the palate, offsetting the sulphurous tang of the orchestra’s German-style rotary-valve trumpets (they switched to something a bit brighter for the Janacek).