Proms
David Benedict
“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring. Choosing poetry that can be richly enhanced by music is not always a trick composers have pulled off, so it’s to Sarah Connolly's and pianist Joseph Middleton’s enormous credit that they created such an eloquent Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A complex Swedish product to unpack, this one. Someone in the BBC must have worked out that it could do with a detailed instruction manual to help people with the task: the programme booklet duly ran to a full 50 pages.There were two sets of components: firstly, all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, performed by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and soloists. Plus, alongside each concerto, a newly commissioned companion piece by a prominent composer. The 12 works, six by Bach plus the six new pieces, were spread over two Proms on Sunday. Time required for complete assembly of the finished Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Anyone who came to the National Youth Orchestra’s annual Prom in the hope of hearing some roof-raising feelgood blockbuster might have slunk out disappointed into the tropical night of Kensington. What an ambitious, high-concept menu Sir George Benjamin slated for the teenaged regiment – over 160 of them at full strength – and how confidently they served (almost) all of it. If this was big-band music, then it took the form of a suite of pieces that often demanded that the orchestra march – or perhaps, swim – in several directions at once. From Mussorgsky (as arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov) in Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes the more modestly scaled Proms work best in the Albert Hall. Not that there was anything but vast ambition and electrifying communication from soprano Anna Prohaska and the 17-piece Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini, making that 18 when he chose to take up various pipes (★★★★★). By contrast the big BBC commission from Joby Talbot to write a work for much-touted guitarist Miloš Karadaglić and orchestra in the evening's first Prom left very little impression. Praise be, then, to Glinka and Tchaikovsky for showing what glittering substance is all about, and to Alexander Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was inspired by the huge scale of the Albert Hall. The three works all evoke spacious vistas, through their expansive textures, echo effects and horn calls. Mozart, Haas and Strauss made for a diverse programme though, the three works all written in different centuries, and each on a grander scale than the last.The Mozart Notturno in D Major is one of his many serenades written for the Salzburg aristocracy. The twist is that the ensemble is divided into four groups, each a string orchestra with a pair of horns added, and the four groups are set at a distance, the musical ideas Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Children’s concerts are a tricky business, but the BBC has hit on a good formula with its Ten Pieces project, now in its fifth year. Ten works are chosen for their diversity and accessibility, and these become the basis for education projects throughout the year, culminating in the Proms concerts. This allows the concerts to be more entertainment than education, which is all for the best, and the events remain deservedly popular, performed twice in one day, each time to near capacity audiences.In the first year, 2014, the concert ended with the appearance of a spectacular firebird puppet ( Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Two of the major themes in this year’s Proms season are the hundredth anniversaries of the death of Hubert Parry and the end of the First World War. This programme brought those two ideas together, with two works by Parry himself, along with pieces influenced by the war and written in its aftermath by Parry’s pupils Holst and Vaughan Williams. The result was an imaginative if sprawling programme, including some interesting new discoveries, and concluding with a memorable reading of Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony.Parry was the most accomplished British symphonist of the 19th century, but Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beguiling echoes, patterns and symmetries accompanied the Hallé on this Proms journey through the enchanted forests of orchestral sound. Those mellow but irresistible horns that began the evening with the ethereal chug of the pilgrim’s hymn from the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser returned at the very end to celebrate victory over an evil sorcerer in a glorious finale to Stravinsky’s third Firebird suite. Neatly, the “Dresden” version of Wagner’s overture (which we heard) dates from 1845, whereas Stravinsky finished his final iteration of the music for Diaghilev’s 1910 ballet a century later Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a particular quality to light seen from shadow. Think of the surface of the water glimpsed, hazy and haloed, as you swim upwards after a deep dive, or the smudged edges of city lights seen from a night flight. This concert by Ben Gernon and the BBC Philharmonic was an exercise in adjusted perspective. The sunny landscapes of Brahms’ Second Symphony and the smoky, slow-motion horror of 9/11 as viewed through Tansy Davies’ 9/11-inspired What Did We See? share little, but collided as they were here, each reframed the other, repositioned the listener.Premiered by English National Opera in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto combines the composer’s usual angst and nerviness with a sardonic humour, right from the opening bars, where the cello and orchestra seem to be playing in contradictory keys. At last night’s Prom, cellist Alisa Weilerstein played the opening motto not as a challenge, but as the continuation of a conversation already in progress. It was also very fast, which issued a different kind of challenge to the orchestra.The woodwind of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, heavily featured in this concerto as they so often are in Shostakovich, responded with some sparkling Read more ...
David Nice
Once the Proms season is under way, you soon regret dissing the prospectus. Connections become apparent, long-term programming a merit, especially this weekend just gone, which took us from elegies and meditations on two world wars heavenwards at the halfway point - Britten's cautious but still cathartic optimism at the end of the masterly Sinfonia da Requiem - and up to the heights of Beethoven's "Choral" finale and Mahler's Eighth. It was also a fabulous demonstration of how a world can be captured as much in a five-minute piece as a 90-minute so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”.We began Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What a fabulous score Pelléas et Mélisande is, and what a joy to be able to hear it in a concert performance without the distraction of some over-sophisticated director’s self-communings. Well, if only. What last night’s Prom in fact served up was a kind of abstract of Stefan Herheim’s Glyndebourne production, semi-staged by Sinéad O’Neill without its organ-room setting and all that that entailed, but with a great deal of its dramaturgical clutter still intact. This was emphatically a performance for the radio. I was in the Albert Hall, but I suspect the orchestral playing will have Read more ...