BBCPhil/Noseda/Selaocoe review – a proms concert that was everything the festival does best

A programme – Bach, Beethoven and a Jessie Montgomery premiere – that looked odd on paper made perfect sense in the hall, with Abel Selaocoe a mesmerising soloist in Montgomery’s ‘These Righteous Paths’

‘Thy magic power reunites / All that custom has divided / All men become brothers / Under the sway of thy gentle wings.” The BBC can’t have known when they booked Manchester’s BBC Philharmonic to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – culminating in Schiller’s ode to fellowship and unity – that it would mark Andy Burnham’s appointment as prime minister. Our new leader’s “gentle wings” will need the span of a 747 to embrace every warring faction beneath them, but what a welcome from a Proms concert that was everything the festival does best.

A strange programme on paper – Bach, Beethoven and a brand new cello concerto – made absolute sense in the hall, where musical past and future were held suspended together in a rapt continuous present. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor set the tone. Arranged for orchestra by Andrew Davis, it had a distinct twinkle in its eye. Dutiful, even dogmatic, string exegesis takes a sudden sideways turn as the wind bend and distort the theme. And is that a celesta doubling the flute – a shimmering ghost in the orchestral machine, a childish distortion of the original organ? It’s wittily done, and under former chief conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the orchestra relished this fusion of sonic worlds.

It was a process only amplified by the UK premiere of Jessie Montgomery’s These Righteous Paths – a cello concerto “born through” (in the composer’s own words) its soloist Abel Selaocoe, whose unique skills both enabled and inspired its unusual form. A tribute to Montgomery’s mother – playwright Robbie McCauley – the concerto’s three movements each take poems by McCauley as their starting point.

The texts are not always delivered directly, instead they inform the cello’s searching lines, wordless vocalise, mouth percussion, throat singing and African song – all performed by Selaocoe, who is less a singer or instrumentalist here than a storyteller through sound. There are nods to Bach and Elgar, but this concerto is entirely its own creation: an iridescent fabric woven between orchestra and soloist that dares imagine McCauley’s “new song … about something more”. Selaocoe is the mesmerising shaman at its centre.

And then there was the Beethoven, deliberately classical and fleetfooted under Noseda, chasing the original shock of that extraordinary chorale finale. Classily delivered by a strong quartet of soloists and the Philharmonia Chorus, concealing the considerable strain of the composer’s demands, it was an argument not just for peace but progress, risk-taking, visionary optimism. Over to you, Andy.

• Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 12 September.