BBCSO/Oramo review – yes, Inmo Yang is phenomenal but the BBC Symphony shone even brighter tonight

Barbican Hall, LondonThere was poise and passion in the Korean violinist’s Bartók, with Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony adding bite and touches of humour

In a classical music world where virtuosity comes as standard, only a handful of soloists find themselves regularly described as a “phenomenon”. Korean violinist Inmo Yang is among them – and he’s still on the rise, more than a decade after his first major competition win and three years since making his UK debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Sakari Oramo. Reunited here with the same musicians for Bartók’s early Violin Concerto No 1, Yang was all poise and passion, delivering the long, winding paragraph for the soloist that opens the work with characteristically supple elegance. His tone was tender – almost retro, in fact, in its natty sweetness – even in the more energetic portions of the second movement.

This was a performance drawn throughout in a lyrical cursive: lovely, but monochromatically earnest. Any hint of humour, bite, darkness came purely from the orchestra, as Oramo released taut flurries of brass, bright pinpricks of harp and deliciously unbuttoned rustic string playing. The result? That this most dependable of British orchestras – so easily taken for granted – stole the limelight to become the concerto’s charismatic stars.

Elsewhere in the programme, the BBCSO had still more space to shine. Oramo conjured gleamingly translucent textures in Brahms’ Symphony No 1. Slithering contrabassoon lines and double basses in organ-stop mode were unusually audible, while woodwind solos were beautifully sculpted and the tightly controlled string pizzicato at the start of the finale instantly stilled the audience. Tutti passages were finely blended, dynamics subtle.

There was little subtlety in Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No 1, this concert’s opener. Oramo’s podium manner was that of a conductor possessed: an irrepressible combination of head bobs and hip wiggles, arms whirling like windscreen wipers in a downpour and hands rippling like jellyfish, nursery-school marching and all-out air traffic control. But on a dank November evening, this performance’s kitsch burst of colour and canned folksiness – the strings serving ultra-lushness and tipsy village band in alternation, the trumpets sounding as if they’d escaped from a local big top – was 10 glorious minutes of sunny winter getaway.