Proms
alexandra.coghlan
On paper it was a perfect Monday night programme – Scriabin’s extravagant sprawl of a First Symphony and Stravinsky’s The Firebird in its roomy original ballet score. A pairing of youthful 20th-century Russians conducted by the 21st-century Russian. Barely recovered from Sunday’s sensuous binge of Mussorgsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Gergiev and the LSO promised some welcome hair of the dog. Yet by the time the inevitable Proms standing ovation shifted to its feet something was still lacking; mellow we certainly were. Intoxicated? Not even close.There’s something disarmingly Read more ...
David Nice
How did they do it? This was another Prom which looked almost too much on paper but worked hair-raisingly well in practice. It was a Vladimir Jurowski special: whizzing, clamorous demons versus introspective reveries, church bells bringing one witches' sabbath to an end, alarm bells kicking off another. And from the first rapid crescendo of the Musorgsky-Rimsky Korsakov Night on a Bare Mountain to the truly great Julia Fischer's much slower build of a cadenza in Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto and on to the final wind-up of Prokofiev's hellish Third Symphony, the performers held nearly Read more ...
David Nice
This was the Prom I’d earmarked as the most unmissable event out of this year’s 76. Starry attraction was the century-overdue UK premiere of maverick-mystic Dane Rued Langgaard’s Music of the Spheres, born for this of all venues. But the meshing of microscopic Ligeti with big stalwarts of the core repertoire, the marriage of legendary Danish choral singers with the country’s best orchestra and the presence of two live wires, violinist Henning Kraggerud and conductor Thomas Dausgaard, promised other fresh perspectives. Did they deliver? Truly, madly, deeply.This was the Prom I’d earmarked as Read more ...
David Nice
Swimming in the soup of the lesser late Romantics can be hard work. You get to admire the pretty variegated fish as you flounder, waiting to be buoyed up by a bigger idea. Then one comes along and nudges away so insistently that you nearly drown. Both extremes had to be borne in the first half of last night's Prom, with Ingo Metzmacher steering a supple course between the lazy devil of a Schreker operatic interlude and the placid blue sea of Korngold's Violin Concerto. The one interesting question that kept me afloat in viscous waters was: could he turn master oarsman and steer the superior, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Classic FM presenter and former Culture Minister David Mellor was his usual charming self in his column in this weekend's Mail on Sunday. Reviewing the Sondheim at 80 Prom, he found his enjoyment impaired by activity at the side of the stage. Or as he put it, "that distracting bloke on stage signing the performance". He is referring, of course, to Dr Paul Whittaker OBE, who had been engaged to sign the first ever Prom for the deaf.Readers of theartsdesk will be familiar with Whittaker's work. To recap, he is the highly distinguished founder of the Music and the Deaf charity. He was Read more ...
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 ...