Proms
alexandra.coghlan
Every year there are a couple of Proms that have a haphazard look about them, as if a fire had suddenly broken out in the BBC archives, and the programming committee grabbed whatever came to hand – a piano quartet, a couple of choral odes and a concerto for mandolin – and made for freedom. Though there had evidently once been a clear architecture to Sunday’s concert by the BBC Symphony Chorus and friends, in practice things were somewhat confused; endless personnel shiftings and a stuffed-to-bursting programme blunted the impact of music which demanded altogether simpler treatment.Bookending Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It seemed odd on paper. Two Mahler symphonies? In one night? I don't think I'd ever seen that. Last night's Prom showed why not. While Valery Gergiev's second half Mahler Five saw the stage transfigured into a writhing sea of bodies and the air filled with an epic sound, his first half starter, Mahler Four, fell flat on its face. One was a performance; the other was a rehearsal to a performance. It's no wonder really. The World Orchestra for Peace, the king of scratch bands, made up of concert masters and principals from the leading orchestras of the world, last met in September 2009. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Tenebrae service of Maundy Thursday sees Satan's removal men take over holy duties. Crosses are veiled, lights are extinguished, songs of wailing erupt. Stravinsky's Threni (receiving its Proms debut last night) is a setting of these wails - the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah - and is carved out of a dark, unforgiving orchestra and a suffocating choral weave. For the atheist, if not for those of a religious bent who might prefer the succour of François Couperin or Thomas Tallis's settings, there can be no better depiction of the asphyxiation of despair. Last night's rendition Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Being a great Mahler conductor is all about going the extra distance: the near-inaudible pianissimo, the seismic crescendo, the rhetorical ritardando; the accelerando that borders on reckless, the tempo change that crashes the gear-shift, the general pause that becomes a gaping chasm. Mahler took all the trappings of Austro-German music to the edge and back. His most successful interpreters do likewise. So, on the evidence of this Prom performance of the pantheistic Third Symphony, is Donald Runnicles a great Mahler conductor? Maybe not quite, not yet. But getting there. The first movement of Read more ...
David Nice
What a quintessential Prom: a quartet of works by English composers which aspire to international status, and in three cases wholly succeed, performed by the BBC's Scottish orchestra at world-class level under its homegrown but deservedly globetrotting chief conductor Donald Runnicles. And doing what the Albert Hall, if handled properly, assists in doing best - not the noisy stuff, but the secret rapture of four increasingly sublime slow movements welcoming us in from the Victorian colosseum's vasts. Many in the packed hall had come, I suspect, for that Classic FM Hall of Fame evergreen, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It was a huge irony that the focus of last night's Proms programme was the musical duet: the concerto, the waltz, the visual-aural duet of a Ravel tone poem. For the one duet that really mattered - the dance of necessity between conductor, Jonathan Nott, and orchestra, the BBC Symphony - was of the two-left-feet variety. The relationship wasn't quite as dissonant as that between the two notes of Ligeti's Musica ricercata No 2 - part of a cycle of works for piano that deal with one note, then two, then three, then four and so on - which reared its intensely stand-offish two heads in the Read more ...
David Nice
Everybody in the business says don’t think Sondheim is easy. I’ve seen galas where big names stumbled in under-rehearsed numbers, and last night Bryn Terfel and Maria Friedman slipped and almost fell on the same banana skins that had done for them in a hastily semi-staged Sweeney Todd. Not enough to matter, though, and they rightly brought the house down. And the show as a whole? Not quite a so-great-you-want-to-get-up-and-join-in event like last year’s MGM Prom, but still a stylish and slick homage to the great man in his 80th birthday year.The rhythms, the patter, the pathos, the pace Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The stage of the Royal Albert Hall has a rather unfortunate habit of making orchestras seem incidental. Stretching endlessly across, one of the world’s largest organs by way of backdrop, even the most generous conventional ensembles take on Lilliputian proportions. Youth orchestras, with their Romantic scale and do-or-die attack, often emerge best from this encounter, as the Simón Bolívar and Gustav Mahler ensembles have recently proved. Framed by eight double basses and five horns, the Royal Albert Hall finally starts to make sense as a performance space. In the hands (and lips) of the Read more ...
David Nice
The banquet's laid, the host is absent but the guests can still relish the first-class fare in his memory. Sir Charles Mackerras was perhaps looking down happily in the company of Mozart and Dvořák as another oboist-turned-conductor like himself, Douglas Boyd, put his beloved Scottish Chamber Orchestra players buoyantly through their paces. The special late-night Prom, the second we wish he'd lived long enough to conduct, was one Mackerras had planned so carefully as a serenading double bill especially close to his heart. Our late maestro couldn't have wished for anything more blithe as a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Stockhausen's festive overture from 1977 opens the programme," declared the Proms website cheerily. Come again? Festive? Stockhausen? From my limited but largely enthusiastic knowledge of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen - much of which is about as festive as Auschwitz - I assumed that this must either be a big misunderstanding or a lively, perhaps German, joke. It was both. There can have been few composers more ballistically, brilliantly obnoxious than loopy old Karlheinz Stockhausen. Most famously, he declared the attack on the Twin Towers "the greatest work of art Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If the bust of Sir Henry Wood that watches over the stage of the Royal Albert Hall had come to life, Commendatore-like, during last night’s concert, I can’t help feel that he would have been smiling. Beethoven nights – once a popular Proms fixture – have lately fallen off the calendar, but alongside various nods to tradition have this year returned. Following Jiří Bělohlávek and Paul Lewis’s recent concerto-fest, Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen last night presented a second all-Beethoven programme. Between the heart-racing tempos and exuberant playfulness, any Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It has just been announced that Dame Judi Dench will be making her Proms debut this Saturday. Sondheim at 80 is the occasion, and she will reprise her rendition of “Send in the Clowns” from the National’s 1985 production of A Little Night Music. “It’s yours now,” Sondheim told her when he heard her performance. She will line up alongside Bryn Terfel, Simon Russell Beale, Daniel Evans, Maria Friedman, Caroline O’Connor, Julian Ovenden and Jenna Russell, as well as the BBC Concert Orchestra and a chorus of singers from the BBC Performing Arts Fund, all under the baton of David Charles Read more ...