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“Martin Fröst magically wielded the clarinet for Jazz”

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This night’s BBC Proms (31 July 2025) opens with Elsa Barraine’s Symphony No. 2, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein. While this is an emotionally intensive and pungent piece explicitly illustrates the anxiety against war, through Barraine’s non-conventional composition, Weilerstein approached it with delicacy and gentleness while not losing its penetrating nature, just like a palm strike that only melts your bone.

Followed are two clarinet concertos by Aaron Copland and Artie Shaw, featuring clarinettists Martin Fröst, a man in his 50s but still has this boyish demeanour. Saxophone or clarinet for Jazz? Jazz lovers can debate it forever. While Saxophone is definitely the norm for modern Jazz nowadays, Copland and Shaw showcase what clarinet can do. While maybe not as sensual and swing-y as saxophone, clarinet clearly speaks better in fluidity, playfulness and even sarcasm.

Fröst is born for this. As early as his Mozart album, he had already revealed that tendency. Instead of offering a clichéd interpretation of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto K.622 that seeks celestial redemption or serenity from heaven, Fröst’s performance feels playful, restless and agitating, charged with an almost irrepressible desire for improvisation. He indeed captured that improvisational spirit of jazz, spontaneous, unrestrained, and free – not just notes, but those in-between the notes. For the encore, Fröst invited the audience to hum Ave Maria while him playing Bach’s C Major prelude through his magical black pipe, despite the fact that Bach never wrote anything for Clarinet. While most audience members seem unable to recite the lyrics, the crowd still made that happen quite harmoniously. 

The second half features Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, which turned out to be somewhat disappointing for my taste. A notoriously demanding piece for conductors, it seemed Weilerstein aimed to bring about a brand-new interpretation, which to a great extent, failed to do the magic. The overall balance skewed heavily: the strings felt downplayed, even muted, while the brass dominated almost all the time with inappropriate weight.

At times, it felt as though a sound engineer had cranked the low-frequency EQ to maximum with a layer of irreducible background noise. In the third movement, “lento assai” especially, the overall sound is too murky, difficult for the audience to distinct hyper-charged percussion from the bass-y strings. The violins lacked their high-pitch shimmer and lyrical brightness, and the woodwind instruments were almost vanished into the mix-sometimes piercingly audible, but more often muffled. More troubling was the absence of clarity in the orchestral layering. Rather, it was effectively flattened, like a high-resolution image inexplicably downgraded to early 2000s-pixel resolution. In passages requiring interplay and responsiveness between sections, the orchestra frequently sounded uncoordinated and the percussion in the last few measures came off somewhat chaotic.