Proms
David Nice
Those of us schooled in the English choral tradition know and love Hubert Parry's "My soul, there is a country", but few have sung or heard it live as the first of a mighty cycle. Parry completed the six Songs of Farewell not long before his death 100 years ago. In the sensitivity of their word-setting and the harmonies used to underline the text, they are as much of a collective masterpiece in their way as Strauss's Four Last Songs of 44 years later – featured, with astute Proms planning, in the evening Prom – and they need a fine conductor to marshal their speech-melodic flow. It must have Read more ...
David Nice
Who is the greatest British conductor in charge of a major orchestra? It's subjective, but my answer is not what you might expect. Jonathan Nott has done all his major work so far on the continent. He left the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in excellent shape to another of the world's best, Jakub Hrůša; and now he is, as we learned from two long-term players in the Proms Plus talk, liked and respected across the board at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Continuity with the first major Swiss orchestra founded by Ernest Ansermet 100 years ago was underlined last night in Debussy, Ravel and Read more ...
David Nice
This should have been the third much-anticipated Prom of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's inspiring communicator-in-chief Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. She's now on maternity leave. So those of us who hadn't experienced Ludovic Morlot live before had a chance to witness what a splendid moulder and shaper he is, here in a skilfully co-ordinated all-French programme. It was not the fault of his impeccable presentation if prodigiously gifted Lili Boulanger's setting of Psalm 130 didn't come across quite as anticipated from estimable note-writer Roger Nichols' declaration of the work as a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The days are long gone when a Proms gig by Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra felt like a life-changing visitation by a major prophet. Expectations of the ensemble he and the scholar-writer Edward Said founded in 1999 to encourage young Arab, Israeli and (later) Mediterranean-region musicians to work, and play, together have contracted on the political front. Meanwhile, WEDO’s purely musical scope and ambition has never ceased to grow. Now, a WEDO event feels (almost) like a normal Proms night at the Royal Albert Hall, although a special warmth – bordering on reverence – Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Music-lovers who normally balk at the sight of national colours in a concert hall would surely have forgiven the little Estonian flags – in stripes of blue, black and white – that waved happily at the conclusion of this Prom. Under the baton of Paavo Järvi, dynamic and resourceful heir to a conducting dynasty, the Estonian Festival Orchestra came to London to celebrate the centenary of the first phase of the nation’s independence from Russian rule – a freedom lost in 1940 and not fully reclaimed until 1991. Yet Järvi steered not a corny carnival of patriotic uplift but a thoughtfully balanced Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When did this weird mix-tape fashion take root at the Proms? Just a couple of days after Antonio Pappano ran Haydn into Bernstein without pausing for breath, Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields sought to splice the final yearning notes of Frank Bridge’s Lament to the spooky short adagio that opens Beethoven’s Fourth. Some alert applauders broke the thread, which meant that we never quite heard if the join would hold firm.Yes, smart programming draws attention to the hidden kinship that binds seemingly disparate pieces across periods and styles. Still (literally, in this Read more ...
David Nice
Unanticipated miracles happen every summer in the quiet paradise of Estonia's seaside capital. The first this year came as a total surprise. Having got off the afternoon coach from Riga last Monday and dumped bags at my villa base in Pärnu's garden zone, I headed back into town for the first event. Long on the cards were super-subtle Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing playing Massenet and Saint-Saëns conducted by Paavo Järvi, the festival’s chief mind and heart, and young Estonian musicians from the Järvi Academy in Lepo Sumera’s bracing Musica Profana. But until I opened the programme, I Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In West Side Story, those great, familiar songs just keep on coming. Already by the end of the first half an hour, there have been “The Jet Song”, “Something’s Coming”, “Maria”, “Tonight” and “America”, and there is no shortage of them still to come.Saturday’s “concert version” of the show, in celebration of the Bernstein centenary was always going to be one of the big events of the Proms season. The John Wilson Orchestra have increasingly become a welcome fixture at the Proms since their debut in 2009, and a mainstay of the Saturday night programming. The decision to put on an extra show on Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the beginning, Sir Antonio Pappano created a little chaos of his own. At the outset of this Prom that saw musical shape and form emerge out of primeval aural disorder or ruinous destruction, the conductor chose to elide the opener – the representation of “Chaos” from Haydn’s Creation – with centenary birthday-boy Leonard Bernstein’s First Symphony. You could see his point, in a programme that climaxed with Mahler’s First to offer a trio of trail-blazing pieces that hammer something out of nothing, beauty from the void.Yet this pause-less slide from Haydn’s astonishing reinvention of the Read more ...
David Benedict
It was all about the acoustic. Well, almost. Disregarding the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, there’s a school of thought that believes the Proms is the world’s greatest concert series in the world’s worst hall. Why? Because its problematic acoustic is so ungovernable. It certainly wreaked havoc in Sunday’s Prom of the Brandenburg Concertos – I’ve never heard professional orchestral playing so lacking in ensemble – and in this intriguing Anglo-American BBC Philharmonic concert, the cavernous space proved as much a hindrance as a help.Initially, it was all gain. Juanjo Mena Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved. It feels very much like a requiem for our times as much as the composer’s, and last night’s performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Richard Farnes, although very traditional in style, had a striking immediacy.But first came Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising, the Proms premiere of a 20-year-old piece. In the year the Proms committed to increasing its representation of women composers it is also marking Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Prom 31 featured an American orchestra playing an all-American programme – until the final encore dived thrillingly into a completely different musical tradition. But one of the principal features of American music – its joyous risk-taking – was undermined by conductor Osmo Vänskä’s cautious tempos, and the orchestral playing only periodically caught fire.This started with a somewhat routine performance of Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant Candide overture. In recent times it has been heard more at the Proms as an encore than a curtain-raiser, and perhaps does work better as a glorious sign-off, Read more ...