Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.This time last year Simon Rattle was at the BBC Proms bidding farewell to the London Symphony Orchestra in his last London concert as music director. This summer he was back with his new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, for their first Proms visit together.Various reasons have been put forward for Rattle’s departure from the UK — Brexit, the failure to secure a new London concert hall, doubts over government commitment to the arts — but in the current climate taking on a German orchestra with ample resources inevitably looks like a smart deal.These were two fine concerts in almost all respects. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra fielded good solo work and corporate virtuosity, but it does not have the distinctive sound quality of Rattle’s previous two orchestras in Berlin and London. In addition, in the first concert there were enough infelicities of accuracy and ensemble to take the sheen off the playing.Their two-day visit opened with Prom 61 in spectacular fashion with the first UK performance of Thomas Adès’s new 20-minute work Aquifer. A huge orchestra filled the stage, including six percussion players on such recherché items as scaffolding bars, whip and “rattles” (a nod to the conductor who brought about the commission?).There are other composers who start from here, but few who can match Adès’s authority. Aquifer consistently delivers ideas that seize one’s attention, either in their harmony or in their ability to conjure powerful abstract images in the mind, and that sets Adès apart.The music seems to be drilling down through layers of the Earth’s strata, plumbing depths of airless darkness, before releasing a lava flow of boiling hot sounds. Like John Adams’s Frenzy earlier in the year — similar length, similar orchestral virtuosity — one wishes that Aquifer was part of a bigger work, maybe a symphony. After the performance Rattle presented Adès with the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal.That was followed by Bruckner’s Symphony No 4, last of the Proms tributes to the composer’s bicentenary, 200 years plus one day since he was born. Lithe, quick-changing in mood, what this often urgent performance lost in grandeur, it gained in variety and grip. Rattle performed the symphony in a recent edition of the score, taking in some unfamiliar changes that Bruckner felt brought the work’s proportions into better balance. ★★★★☆The sole work in Prom 62 was Mahler’s Symphony No 6, a mainstay throughout Rattle’s career. By now he must know this symphony inside out, and every detail of Mahler’s world-embracing canvas was plumbed for maximum expression (how many hours of rehearsal had that taken?).In large-scale, romantic works Rattle has always tended to play each moment for all it’s worth, sometimes at the expense of the big picture, and there were a few awkward joins here, but the overwhelming impression was of a performance bursting with everything that it had to say. At often swift speeds, there was an exhilaration to the music-making, a life-affirming sense that every minute should be lived to the full. ★★★★★To September 14, bbc.co.uk/proms
