Proms 2013: Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski & Rachmaninov, The Oslo Philharmonic, review The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra was honed and given its strong international profile during the two decades and more that Mariss Jansons spent as its music director up until 2002. André Previn and Jukka-Pekka Saraste have been at the helm in the interim, but now the orchestra has a new chief conductor in Vasily Petrenko, well known here for his inspirational work at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. In the first of its two Proms this year, the Oslo orchestra gave a programme that suited both it and Petrenko to a T. However, in Rachmaninov's "Symphonic Dances" Petrenko took the bold decision to differentiate significantly between the slow music and the propulsive. Whether this actually worked in performance is a moot point, particularly in relation to the first movement. Rachmaninov's tempo marking at the start of the piece is not especially helpful: "not fast" leaves the desired speed open to question, but Petrenko established a good, decisive and incisive rhythm that underpinned the music's natural buoyancy. Quite early on, though, Rachmaninov pulls things back for a long, languid central section with a prominent melody for the alto saxophone. He had tried a similar fast-slow-fast structure in a much earlier piece, the "Capriccio on Gypsy Themes" of the 1890s, where the music certainly needs a firm directorial hand to make it work. The "Symphonic Dances" have never seemed to present quite such a problem of cohesion, but Petrenko's resolve to take the first movement's slow section at such a measured pace somehow made the architecture insecure, with a sagging and flagging centre. In other respects, though, the performance made its mark, particularly in the wealth of detail that Petrenko elicited from Rachmaninov's orchestral palette, crisply articulated and luminous of colour. And these were qualities that also distinguished the other two works in the programme, Tchaikovsky's First Symphony and Szymanowski's First Violin Concerto. This is the Szymanowski of 1916, when he can be heard as a fellow-traveller alongside Stravinsky, Bartók and Prokofiev. But the hypnotic, sensuous accent of the music is Szymanowski's own, and the orchestra and soloist, Baiba Skride, were united in finding a beguiling, scintillating tone of voice. Orchestral characterisation was of a comparable finesse in Tchaikovsky's "Winter Daydreams" Symphony. With textures enlivened by rippling woodwind and with Tchaikovsky's youthful fugal obsessions deftly negotiated, this was a highly cultivated performance, achieving an ideal equilibrium between balletic delicacy, lyrical charm and rhythmic zest.