Prom 29: Size Matters . . .

It's big.  Very big. It's hard not to feel awe looking at it, even when you know you shouldn't. you wish you had one like it. And it's sometimes subject to abuse. Most notably—and on a Sunday, too1— two years ago by the Mohican haired Cameron Carpenter, playing Bach as though it was Meatloaf's lead instrument.

But it produces amazing climaxes, now no-one's frightened to handle it as they used to be. And there's nothing quite like an opportunity to show off its full throbbing grandeur than St Saens' 'Organ' Symphony.

Thus it was in Prom 29. A pity, then, that there is more to Saint-Saens Symphony No 3 than the organ. It is, after all, called a 'symphony', not a sonata for  organ with orchestral accompaniment. A pity, too, that Noseda couldn;t—as so often happens with recordings of the piece—match the power of the organ with something approaching equal power from the orchestra.

Or give us anything like enough of the textural and tonal fancifulness that Saint-Saens scored that makes Symphony No 3 in the right hands (and they're few) more than a bit of trivia with a single theme to be lifted for cartoons. It wasn't as it should, or could, have been,

What it can be, is admirably expressed in a advocatory piece by Tom Service in the Guardian, which says pretty much what I would have liked to, so I shall happily leave it to him. He writes, at the end:

"I have the image, at the end of the symphony, of the concert hall being miraculously lifted off the ground and held aloft by the combined efforts of all those pipes and all that air; all that counterpoint and all that time-stretching speeding up and slowing down; all that scraping and blowing, and all those keyboards. The whole work is a magnificent and fantastical symphonic machine that's an apotheosis of the orchestral technology of the late 19th century. In other words: the Organ Symphony is the definitive steampunk symphony"

Of all the places the Saint-Saens should have flown high into the roof to burst into the evening sky, it should have been the Albert Hall. It cries out for it. But it didn't happen; Nosada's conducting was too often leaden, note-bound, as though the score was a library edition only worth dusting off for the sake of the organ.

Perhaps its sheer size loomed over Nosada; perhaps it intimidated him instead of exciting him, for all its (relatively) new-found fun lighting which every Prom now shows it off as a piece of Victorian steampunk engineering.

Oh, but that organ! Apparently, at rehearsal, at every entry, the orchestra cheered. I'm not sure they should have been cheering it on like a rugby crowd; more like rugby forwards gearing themselves up for a scrum. But perhaps they were intimidated by its size, too. It was wonderful.

It's come into its glory days again, after all those dismal years when either  no-one dared play it or dared not risk more than a few dozen bars on it; or, sometimes, played it as though it was a mouse-chewed old church harmonium. And you wondered if it was just boasting.

Yes, size does matter . . .