Focusing on three major American figures, the Aurora Orchestra's late-night Prom under Nicholas Collon centred on the first UK performance of Philip Glass's Tenth Symphony, which had its world premiere in Aix-en-Provence last August. Running to some 30 minutes, this five-movement work often feels like a suite of character pieces covering familiar Glass territory, but with more obviously memorable melodic ideas overlaying its rhythmic and structural foundations.
Offbeat dance rhythms wrongfoot their way through the opening movement. Fragments of folk-like ideas dominate the second and third, the latter distinctly oriental in character and rising in a steady crescendo. The fourth is relatively generic, but the finale once again builds up a considerable head of steam using simple devices cleverly juxtaposed over a constant percussion beat. Though the music's momentum was never forced, Collon's measured performance gave the symphony's gradated repetitions a clear sense of purpose as well as direction.
The Glass necessarily felt far more spread out, though, than the work that began the programme – Conlon Nancarrow's Study for Player Piano No 7, orchestrated by Yvar Mikhashoff, whose brightly inventive colour scheme matched nicely with the intricacies of the original, highlighting the apparently wayward progress of the individual lines that criss-cross their way through it.
Also featured were two works by the unique and indefinable Frank Zappa, both in orchestrations by Ali N Askin. The sonic vortex of G-Spot Tornado was realised with extrovert panache. A much grander satirical phantasmagoria on those aspects of American culture Zappa despised and detested, his Adventures of Greggery Peccary proved both outlandish and hugely entertaining, with baritone Christopher Purves as a pink-suited wild swine and Mitch Benn the convivial narrator in a performance that often felt like a cartoon caper with the picture turned off.
• On BBC iPlayer until 8 August.
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