Royal Albert Hall
Bernard Hughes
The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First Night of the Proms. This is traditionally an opportunity to programme a large-scale choral work, and last night that was Vaughan Williams’s seldom heard Sancta Civitas. Of course it’s seldom heard, with its huge orchestra expanded to include organ, piano and off-stage trumpet, baritone soloist, massed choir behind the orchestra and children’s choir in the gallery – plus a blink-and-you-miss-it tenor solo at the end that must command the highest Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Will Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour ever come to an end? Two years on from the last UK tour, he’s returned, with substantially the same band, once again mostly featuring material from his brilliant album Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). He’s a little less steady on his feet, but remains as present as ever, clearly enjoying being on stage and contact with an audience that welcomes him with love as well as uncritical adulation.There is a routine: he mostly starts out standing beside Tony Garnier, his wonderfully supple root of a bass player, with a handheld mic, but not for long. He soon moves over Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.Cho followed three pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs with the second book, “Italie”, of Liszt’s rhapsodic musical scrapbook of his travels of the 1840s, Années de Pèlerinage. The first revelation Read more ...
David Nice
The Proms’ Indian summer of big visiting orchestras is over – and what a parade it’s been – but renewal hit on the last Saturday before the Last Night with a rainbow of choral concerts, from the 26 voices of The Sixteen (yes, counter-intuitive, I know) and the 33 of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers to 250 from six choirs as crisp as a small ensemble under John Butt in a Messiah with a difference.Parry’s “I Was Glad” made sense as the beginning of the end, in a good way (though with some rather bizarre organ stops pulled out by Simon Johnson). It was always the choice for my church choir’s last Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler’s Sixth is one of those apocalyptic megaliths that shouldn’t be approached too often by audiences or conductors. It’s been a constant in Simon Rattle’s treasury since 1989, when he first recorded it with his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (they performed it together at the Proms in 1995) to now, when the second of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra concerts followed a recording. Sophisticated, yes, but where was the feral intensity?Perhaps we've just now been spoiled at the Proms by two conductors who seem so mesmerisingly immersed in every moment. Rattle's Mahler no longer Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Hot on the glittering heels of the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko, Sir Simon Rattle brought another stellar German outfit to the Proms, bearing the gift of a Bruckner symphony in the composer’s 200th birthday year. With his (relatively) new team at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rattle served a polished, sophisticated and superbly played Fourth.This was not quite the mystical and monumental Bruckner that hard-core devotees may crave. Still, its wonderfully blended and balanced sound did prove that Rattle’s BRSO now can compete with its starry counterparts in depth and finesse Read more ...
David Nice
Never mind the Last Night, it’s always the preceding Proms weeks which lead us through different rooms of a dream palace as visiting orchestras succeed one another. This year has taken on an almost hallucinatory quality as three great conductors – Jakub Hrůša, Kirill Petrenko and Klaus Mäkelä – appeared in close succession. If the Orchestre de Paris isn’t quite on the level with the Czech or Berlin Philharmonics, its love-in with its chief conductor was still electrfying at times.Once again the ludicrous line fired at Mäkelä of "over-hyped Wunderkind" being touted by many who should know Read more ...
David Nice
Is it because the British are wary of national sentiment from a genius that this performance of Má vlast (My Homeland) is the only major London offering in Smetana’s 200th anniversary year? Supple movement, emotional range and unerring climaxes from Kirill Petrenko and his Berlin Phllharmonic might encourage more interest in great operas Libuše and Dalibor (which Jakub Hrůša hopes for in his Royal Opera tenure).Not, alas, in 2024. But let’s celebrate what we did have, a demonstration of why this might be thought of as the world’s greatest orchestra, and why comparisons between Petrenko K and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In their lyrical, often intensely moving afternoon concert at the Proms, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos demonstrated such seamless communication that at points it was tempting to imagine that even their heartbeats were in sync. It’s an obvious statement to say that brilliant music making is as much about listening as playing, yet these three musicians took it to another level, deftly negotiating the Brahms and Beethoven with the elegance of bats finding their way by echolocation.No surprise, perhaps, given that Ma and Ax have known each other since they were teenagers at the Read more ...
David Nice
If you ever doubted that Bizet’s Carmen, 150 years young next year, is one of the greatest operas of all time, this performance would have changed your mind. Among the four principals only Rihab Chaieb’s utterly convincing, consistent protagonist was the same as on first night 22 performances ago, and as ringleader we had the vivacious conductor of the second run, Anja Bihlmaier.It was Glyndebourne music director Robin Ticciati who launched the latest Glyndebourne Carmen, and Bihlmaier seemed to share much of his fast-moving panache. But she also had her own way with some of the surprising Read more ...
David Nice
Namedrop first: it was Charles Mackerras who introduced me to the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová, lending me a CD with her Military Sinfonietta leading the way. It piqued interest, but more as a sense of promise cut short: this abundantly gifted young woman, first female conductor of the Czech Philiharmonic at the age of 22 when she premiered the work, died three years later before fulfilling her genius.Last night’s performance of what might be more accurately called Semi-military Kaleidoscope, though it couldn’t have been finer than in the supple hands of Jakub Hrůša in his second Prom with Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
How easy it is to fall instantly in love with the Dvořák Cello Concerto. And particularly when it is played by an orchestra as fine as the Czech Philharmonic.Everything’s there in the opening minute. We get our first, wonderful. ear-wormish theme straight away, from the subtle grenadilla wood of a lone clarinet in A. Then we hear it build in what seems no time at all to the blaze of the full orchestra. Dvořák marked that first glorious arrival “Grandioso”, and the whole of the strings, wind and brass are involved, every single player throwing her or his whole being into the fortissimo. Read more ...