BBC Proms 2015: Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/Gardiner review – Trademark time travel from an authentic master of the art

Most conductors live by the dictum that great music is better than it can ever be played; in every performance, they look for what eluded them in the past. John Eliot Gardiner recorded Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique more than 20 years ago, but this Proms performance was no mere stroll down memory lane, not least because many of the players were too young to have worked with him in the Nineties. No matter how dictatorial the conductor, different musicians deliver differently.

And then, violins and violas played standing up: I don’t remember Gardiner insisting on that 20 years ago. In the Beethoven, the finale had the whole wind section standing, for all the world like a Forties big band. In other ways, the Gardiner trademarks were all in place: supple but strongly defined rhythms, an acute sense of balance, fierce energy. His orchestra, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, specialises in playing 19th-century music on old instruments, so in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, he regaled us with authentically Berliozian wind instruments, the ophicleide and the serpent. In the second movement he also achieved a powerful coup by moving the four harps to centre-stage. Berlioz’s symphony is pictorial music; Gardiner’s approach made it more picturesque still.

The BBC Proms, until September 12 (0845 401 5040, bbc.co.uk/proms)

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