Swedish Chamber Orchestra/Fröst review – dance, dynamism and a wild rumpus as maverick clarinettist-conductor takes charge

Royal Albert Hall, London The ferociously dynamic SCO help Fröst drill down to the rhythmic essence of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as well as works by contemporary composers It’s a Sunday morning, and as the Royal Albert Hall darkens and the stage is suddenly back-lit, spotlighting a charismatic figure speaking sibilantly at its centre, you’d almost swear you’d wandered into an American megachurch.

But the gospel preached by maverick clarinettist-conductor Martin Fröst is altogether more ancient and more primal: dance.

What could be more fundamental, not just to music but life itself, he argues.

And with the ferociously dynamic Swedish Chamber Orchestra helping him make his case, it’s hard to disagree.

Wagner famously declared Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony “the apotheosis of the dance”, and the SCO’s DNA project (“Dance Now Always”) transforms his description into a concert that drills down to the rhythmic essence of the symphony, seizing those cells and pulses that are its heartbeat and amplifying them into an ear-bending, time-warping sequence that suspends the work at the centre of its own musical genealogy – past and future.

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