Proms
edward.seckerson
It was one of those moments that every conductor (and orchestra) dreads: “The Procession of the Sage” from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is in rip-roaring full cry, percussion grinding and scratching, high trumpet screeching – but Daniele Gatti, it would seem, loses a bar somewhere and gives his Orchestre National de France a premature cut-off, leaving the entire brass section between a rock and a hard place. Stop or play on? An ignominious collapse ensues – as big a blunder as I’ve heard in any professional concert in years. Who says The Rite of Spring no longer has the capacity to shock? Read more ...
David Nice
Is that asking a lot? Probably not, considering what's already been achieved at this year's BBC Proms. Looking back on it, last night felt implausibly rich yet gloriously digestible, too, at least in retrospect. I couldn't have predicted that I would be so swept away by the jam-packed wonders that came from Jean-Christophe Spinosi's Ensemble Matheus and their soloists. But I did know that Denève was fairly certain to deliver the goods, on the strength not only of a spectacular Philharmonia concert earlier this year but also from an RSNO Prom two seasons back which sagged a bit with Stephen Read more ...
stephen.walsh
My abiding memory of the Berlin Philharmonic’s second Prom under Sir Simon Rattle on Saturday will be of 6,000 people listening with rapt, or at any rate silent, concentration to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. Has it ever happened before? Perhaps in Boulez’s day, though I’m not sure even he ever filled this hall for these particular composers. And what does it signify? That we were the stragglers who failed to get tickets for the previous evening’s Beethoven and Mahler? That we would put up with anything to hear Karita Mattila sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs? Or possibly that, after a Read more ...
David Nice
Did anyone find the aged-rocker thrash of Mark Anthony Turnage's new work at the Proms, Hammered Out - a bit of a disappointment to Edward Seckerson - oddly familiar? This brilliant YouTube remix will tell you why. And for all the orchestral flash, which struck me too as a bit vieux jeu, give me the dazzling Beyoncé Knowles and her sensational dance routine in that video over the Turnage piece any day.
igor.toronyilalic
Yet again I leave a Herbert Blomstedt concert with a sense of wonderment and bemusement. Wonderment at the extraordinary music-making that this man is capable of. Bemusement as to why he is not better known, his talents not more widely recognised, his services not more often called upon in this, his 83rd year. Last night's masterful Prom saw him leading the youngsters of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester first into the heavens of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony and then into the fiery wastes of hell in Bruckner's terrifying Ninth. Sure, if I passed the tall, mousey, seraphically Read more ...
David Nice
Everyone concerned has, of course, total confidence and bags of experience at the end of a riotous run, warmly applauded by Edward Seckerson at Glyndebourne. Yet there were dangers to be negotiated. Only Irmgard Vilsmaier's Sieglinde-cum-Fricka of a mother and the ringing top of Alice Coote's Hansel as tough boy incarnate were really made to fill the crazy South Ken colosseum. The secret for the rest, and I'm sure Ticciati in his Proms debut must have worked on this, was not to force but rather to draw and coax us into Humperdinck's often startling late-Romantic clash of innocence, experience Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Australia has many fine exports – wine, women, gap year anecdotes – but increasingly it is her orchestras that are setting the standard. With a magnificent Proms performance from the Australian Youth Orchestra still fresh in the ears (as well as a significantly reinvigorated Sydney Symphony courtesy of Ashkenazy), last night it was the turn of the smaller and still-deadlier Australian Chamber Orchestra to fly the national flag, in what may well prove to be the finest concert of the summer.Peteris Vasks is hardly the name on everyone’s lips, but the music of this contemporary Latvian composer Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Short of rolling around the podium like a delirious pig in a mudbath, Sir John Eliot Gardiner couldn't have hidden his enjoyment of the warm, plush sounds and well-upholstered vibrato of this wonderfully old-fashioned orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, less well at last night's Prom. As he embarked on one of the broadest, most unashamedly Romantic openings to Dvořák's Eighth Symphony I have ever heard, I wondered what the hell his years of all-out warfare on modern performance techniques had been about. Was Sir John doing a Kim Philby? Was the period movement's greatest propagandist Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A great deal of scepticism greeted the release of a new Beethoven symphony cycle from Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra in the mid-2000s. Would this lot really be able say anything that hadn't already been said by the hundred or so other cycles? Could anyone really find anything very new or fresh to say about these warhorses? The answer then was yes. And the answer last night in their Prom's performance of Beethoven's Ninth was also a resounding yes. Hardly surprising if you'd heard Vänskä's Bruckner the night before or his Sibelius cycle earlier this year. In Vänskä-land even stale Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One usually has to wait until the fourth movement of a Bruckner symphony before one gets a decent, foot-tappin', knee-slappin' polka to dance to. But at last night's Prom Osmo Vänskä was jitterbugging - and, I think, even moonwalking - from the off, swinging his classy Minnesota Orchestra into the Fourth Symphony's opening fortissimo brass triplets like they were a seasoned jazz band, and making Bruckner boogie. Not the easiest of things to get this granitic old Austrian bumpkin to do.
Vänskä managed it by looking beyond the score. The slur that links the first two notes of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
When Mark-Anthony Turnage presents a piece called Hammered Out, that’s pretty much what you expect to hear. Prior to starting work on this co-commission between BBC Radio 3 and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Turnage was quoted as saying, “I don’t want to write an old man’s piece.” The trouble is that this 15-minute juggernaut for large orchestra sounds like an elder statesman – ie the symphony orchestra – masquerading as a mover and shaker: or to be brutally frank, an old swinger in urgent need of a hip replacement. As a seasoned Turnage fan, I hesitate to say that there’s more than a hint of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?Whatever the reason, the point in such intriguing programmes is not to come out cursing at being served minor-league Read more ...