Royal Albert Hall
Tim Cumming
So it’s your birthday. Not just another one but your 70th. So who’s on the guest list? Let’s see – master concertina player Alasdair Anderson, the "guvnor" Ashley Hutchings, Husker Du’s Bob Mould, bassist extraordinaire Danny Thompson, Fairporters Dave Mattacks and Dave Pegg, Floyd’s David Gilmour, Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls (yes, you read that right), Martin and Eliza Carthy, onetime Strangler Hugh Cornwell, premiere folk singers Maddy Prior, Kate Rusby and Olivia Chaney, family members Jack, Kami, Teddy and Linda Thompson, son-in-law James Walbourne, old mucker Loudon Wainwright III, and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
"The reason why it's so special to be here," says Ezra halfway through the show, "is because this is where I saw so many of my heroes". Tonight is the 26-year-old's debut at the Royal Albert Hall and the look on Ezra's face says he can't quite believe where he's standing. He holds his hands up with a shrug, stares out at the crowd, and smiles a Cheshire Cat grin.This has been a huge year for the unassuming young man from Hertfordshire. It's seen the end of a journey from unlikely pop star (the comedian Jack Whitehall once called him the "Milky Bar Kid all grown up") to bonafide Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
For a few seconds last night, the Royal Albert Hall turned into London’s biggest – and cheesiest – disco. At the end of the Ball movement in the Aurora Orchestra’s dramatised version of the Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz’s tipsily lurching waltz climaxed in a lightshow that sent a galaxy of glitterball stars swirling through the auditorium. You can’t exactly stage a symphony – even one as theatrical as this – as you can an opera. Still, conductor Nicholas Collon and directors Jane Mitchell and James Bonas – abetted by designers Kate Wicks and Will Reynolds – did their utmost to make the work’ Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Blame it on the box set. The four Bach Orchestral Suites fit neatly together as a recording project. They used to fill out the four sides of a double LP back in the early stages of the baroque revival. Completists and collectors could rejoice then, and with many more versions to choose from, they still can now. But are these pieces, which were never intended to be played one after the other, varied enough to make a satisfying and convincing concert? Not really.The first problem is a nagging propensity to hang around in D major. Two of the four suites – so half of the set in the versions Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Semyon Bychkov was a surprising choice to take over the Czech Philharmonic last year, a conductor with few obvious connections to Czech music. But on the strength of this visit to the Proms, they make a good team. Bychkov communicates fluently with the players, conveying power and passion, and detail too, but without any overt theatrics at the podium.The Czech Philharmonic has a burnished tone, well projected and filling the Albert Hall, but more with colour than with weight. There is an elegant and lyrical flow to everything the strings play, which Bychkov is able to harness and shape. The Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the kind of thing that the Proms does well – indeed, where else would it get an outing? A "big event" piece of massive scale in terms of size and duration, in many ways a modern Spem in Alium, but where Tallis’s 1570 piece demands 40 singers, In the Name of the Earth ups the ante to 700-plus voices, led by eight conductors and arrayed around the Royal Albert Hall. Both the title, with its nod towards the Christian sign of the cross, and the scheduling for Sunday morning, made this feel like a secular meditation with the natural environment substituting for a traditional God. As the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Weirdly enough, it was “Tea for Two” that definitively proved her class for me. As a second encore to Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, after a mesmeric transcription of that composer’s Vocalise, Yuja Wang’s goodbye treat channelled the mighty Art Tatum with a scrupulous respect for the jazz master’s timing and phrasing. Sometimes, the Beijing-born megastar still finds herself the target of critical opprobrium on the grounds that serious musicianship really doesn’t mix with such a glittery and flamboyant stage personality. Well, tell that to the Abbé Liszt – or to Rach himself, for that Read more ...
David Nice
His movements are minimal (perhaps they always were). A more intense flick of the baton, a sudden wider sweep of the expressive left hand, can help quicken a tempo, draw extra firepower from the players, but Bernard Haitink's conducting is still the most unforced and, well, musicianly, in the world. His decision to retire from official concert-giving - a "sabbatical", his biography says - after the season in which he celebrated his 90th birthday with two LSO concerts in March means we'll miss him terribly. But it was a timely gesture, like everything he's ever done. This Prom will not be Read more ...
David Nice
So we never got the ultimate Proms spectacular, the four brass bands at the points of the Albert Hall compass for Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts, in the composer's 150th anniversary year. Yet Sir John Eliot Gardiner has learnt how to work the stage - here via director Noa Naamat - so that the performers use his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique as their sounding board - Glyndebourne, please take note for next year's visit - weaving through it as well as around it, with some of the players sharing in the action. This culminating performance in his four-year Berlioz odyssey, shot Read more ...
David Nice
Human sacrifice has a disconcerting and wonderful effect upon great composers, above all when it involves the supremely queasy issue of a father vowing to offer up his child: think of Britten with Abraham and Isaac, Mozart with Idomeneo and Idamante, Gluck with Agamemnon and Iphigenia, and here Handel with Jephtha and Iphis in his last oratorio. How the nominally devout composer responded to this Old Testament horror is at its most astonishing in the choral response at the end of the Second Act, and that certainly hit us hard in last night's Prom.Changing lines from Pope ending "what God Read more ...
David Nice
Let's be clear: this was a Prom of world-class works by English composers, not a conservative concert of English music. Politically speaking, Elgar was one of the few on the right, but how different inwardly, speaking through the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy and singing with his own reminiscences in The Music Makers of timeless art that outlives the fall of empires and individual fates. How moving it was, then, to welcome back Dame Sarah Connolly after her very public statement about her recent operation for breast cancer. The most passionate of Remainers, she might have worn a more pronounced Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After Thursday night’s concert I celebrated the Proms’ exploration of unfamiliar repertoire via the CBSO. The following evening saw the festival diving back into mainstream repertoire – as it must also do – conducted by the CBSO’s previous music director. But although Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is now central to the canon, it wasn’t always so: Henry Wood only ever programmed Bruckner once during his entire reign at the Proms, writing later in his autobiography “the public would not have it then; neither will they now.” Fast-forward 80 years and the public very much will have it, as evidenced Read more ...