Proms
Bernard Hughes
This Prom by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Nil Venditti featured a first half of Welsh composers, including the belated Proms debut of Karl Jenkins at the age of 80. It’s a sign of how Proms programming has evolved over the last 30 years that either of them gets a look-in and, even if I had some mixed feelings about their pieces, it can only be a good thing that they are now being heard in this festival.The second half featured someone who has waited even longer than Jenkins for a first Proms outing – Louise Farrenc, who died in 1875 – alongside a guy called Ludwig van Beethoven, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra first performed at the Proms – to a rapturous welcome – in 2003. For two decades the visits, and the audience rapture, have continued, while the region of most WEDO players’ birth now looks, this hideous year above all, more steeped in blood and hate than ever. Said and Barenboim never intended the orchestra, with its core element of young Arab and Israeli musicians later augmented by players from neighbouring lands, as some kind of soppily high-minded peace project. Rather, they sought a way of creatively Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s begin at the end. Can the Paris Olympics' closing ceremony offer anything as classy or joyous as 260 musicians aged 13 to 18 singing the French carol-plus-farandole finale of Bizet’s L'Arlésienne music?* This encore also made Proms history as a unique riposte to the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra’s instrument-twirling Bernstein “Mambo”. And what a sequel to a Mahler One brimming with energy, masterfully negotiated by conductor Alexandre Bloch.Range rather than cohesion was the name of this supremely high-spirited game. Wagner's Overture to The Flying Dutchman underlined the discipline: Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was my first Prom of the season – always an exciting moment, even in my fourth decade as an attendee. I was hearing the BBC Philharmonic under its newly appointed Principal Guest Conductor, the excellent Anja Bihlmaier, in a programme of two giants of the 19th century Romantic repertoire separated by warp & weft by the American composer Sarah Gibson.This was not the originally billed commission beyond the beyond, as Gibson died of cancer at the age of 38 on 14 July, with the new piece unfinished. It was replaced by warp & weft (2021), based, according to the programme note, on Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days”. So claims one of the gorgeous (and, in this case, risqué) numbers that stud Purcell’s “semi-opera” The Fairy Queen like sequins on a flamboyant party gown.Directed by tenor-turned-conductor Paul Agnew (pictured below), the Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants – together with singers from its sister company Le Jardin des Voix and dancers from Compagnie Käfig – certainly threw one hell of a Proms party. The illustrious French group’s all-dancing, all-singing, hip-hop-flavoured remake of Purcell’s loose riff on A Midsummer Night Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone knew what to expect from this fascinating programme. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, last of his orchestral masterpieces, is nothing like the more familiar aspects of his piano concertos. Nor is Busoni’s nominal attempt at the form, which seems more of a Symphony-Concerto than anything else, and style-wise impossible to pin down. Both works had the fullest care and focus last night.It felt counter-intuitive to have Rachmaninov's very personal swansong in the first half; if some of us couldn't quite tune in to the depths at first, that was no fault of the performance. Edward Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Does John Wilson ever stumble?The Sinfonia of London, the Gateshead-born conductor’s ad hoc all-star super-band, rode into a full-to-bursting Royal Albert Hall once again last night with an all-American Proms programme that promised not just crowd-pleasing Stateside favourites (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in its centenary year, Barber’s Adagio for Strings) but the towering Yosemite peak of John Adams’s massive symphony-in-all-but name, Harmonielehre. There were a couple of moments, especially in a sometimes routine rendering of Copland’s Billy the Kid, when their famously blazing Read more ...
David Nice
How do you get five thousand plus people into the Albert Hall to hear two Sanskrit-based rarities by British-born composers? Simple: place the Elgar Cello Concerto in between them. Here was another daring Prom programme that totally worked, not least since cellist Senja Rummukainen, compatriot of the BBC Symphony Orchestra much-loved Finnish chief conductor Sakari Oramo, proved as sensitive as him and his players to the elusive core of what's surprisingly become a popular classic.At first it seemed as if this interpretation was going to be the polar opposite of the one I'd heard previously, Read more ...
David Nice
Under its master music director, the once-torpid Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has given us some of the most brilliant concerts of the 2023-4 season. Their Prom together changed course from the Elgar/Rachmaninov theme and dared even more, placing together four works in three parts each – two with atmospheric outer sections flanking vivid ceremonials (Ives, Debussy), two placing the lyricism at the dead centre (Ravel, Tchaikovsky).To label it a vintage Prom in form, a new work would have been necessary. But Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England still sounds like one, and its big symphonic Read more ...
David Nice
It seems like only yesterday – the date in fact was 22 December 2016 – that 17-year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason, fresh from his win as BBC Young Musician of the Year, played the Haydn C major Cello Concerto in a Pimlico church with a group of young players known collectively as the Fantasia Orchestra and conducted by Tom Fetherstonhaugh (Sibelius’s Second Symphony followed).In the orchestra was the cellist's 18-year-old violinist brother Braimah. The constitution of the players wasn’t something I knew at the time. Braimah (pictured below by Ron Milsom in a Fantasia concert at the Guiting Festival Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What is Englishness? Over the last century the answer has changed substantially. Yet last night’s Prom, which – according to the programme – set itself the task of celebrating “all things English” had a very particular answer.This was an England of Eric Ravilious paintings, Earl Grey tea, the vibrant greens of a hedgerow, the gentle plop of croquet mallets against croquet balls. The compositions spanned more than a century, and their reference points more than half a millennium, yet they all had an elegance and subtlety that evoked a very homegrown pastoral tradition.From the outset, Read more ...
David Nice
Returning after ten months to the unique vasts of Albert’s colosseum, especially for a Verdi Requiem as powerful as this and a packed hall, felt like a rebirth. There was immediate purging in the focused whispers of the first “Requiem aeternam”s, BBC National Orchestra of Wales Principal Conductor Ryan Bancroft instilling a confidence you knew would last the evening, and instant thrills in the clarion “Kyrie”s of all four world-class soloists.Were there imperfections? Fleetingly. Bass Soloman Howard sometimes ran ahead of the orchestra in “Confutatis maledictis” – Bancroft seems like a Read more ...