Royal Albert Hall
David Nice
It's not so long since Daniel Barenboim sat around a table with Israeli officials telling him that Wagner couldn't be played in the homeland when someone's mobile fanfared the "Ride of the Valkyries", demolishing the opposition's case. At the opposite end of the scale to all that flash of battle-lust came last night's unexpected first encore to a Wagner second half – the Act Three Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It foreshadows opera's most humanistic monologue, in which a deep thinking man of the people bewails the folly and delusion which so quickly knock civilization off course Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The mid-way point of the BBC Proms has just passed. Attention during the eight-week season will inevitably tend to gravitate towards the novelties, “events” and one-offs, but one pre-condition for the summer to be going well is that the Proms' backbone ensemble, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which plays no fewer than 12 of the concerts, has to be on good form. Ideally, they should be playing well across a wide range of repertoire, they should be getting full or nearly full houses, and their relationship with their principal conductor should be positive and productive. On the evidence of last Read more ...
David Nice
Superior light music with a sting, done at the highest level: what could be better for a summer lunchtime in the light and airy Cadogan Hall? Our curator was that most collegial of top soloists, trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger. He'd invited colleagues of many nations, all of them first rate, but it was almost a given that chansonnier-composer HK Gruber would steal the show.That's not to undervalue Hardenberger's own unique contributions, kicking off as piccolo trumpeter with Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields strings in the fireworks-strut of fellow Swede Tobias Broström's Sputnik. Jan Lundgren' Read more ...
David Nice
If the BBC were to plan a Proms season exclusively devoted to youth orchestras and ensembles, many of us would be delighted. Standards are now at professional level right across the board. 20 years ago, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (★★★★★) couldn't compare with its Great British counterpart; now, although the age ranges are slightly different and the (or should that be the) National Youth Orchestra (★★★★) has vast wind and brass sections, playing levels appeared equal. It was only the matter of a conductor's questionable interpretation in the first concert and a superlative Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Concert halls, as Gregg Wallace might observe if he ever went to one, don’t come much bigger than the Royal Albert Hall, nor violin concertos than the Tchaikovsky. Faced with this awesome combination, the temptation for a soloist is to play up to the occasion. Volume gets louder, vibrato faster, emotions are amped. But not for Pekka Kuusisto. This Finnish violinist has always gone his own way, as likely to be found playing jazz, electronica or folk music as a concerto, and his Tchaikovsky last night was no different.From the long opening melody to the Finale’s boot-stamping dance of a theme, Read more ...
Helen Wallace
"Let the song speak, I pray," exhorts the Bard in the Prologue to Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, "Listen in silence." This was a night for leaning in and listening closely, despite the large forces arrayed on stage for Dvořák’s Cello Concerto and Bartók’s opera.It’s been said before, but the Royal Albert Hall is an unforgiving space for this year’s featured instrument, the cello. In the 2014 Proms, I recall American Alisa Weilerstein gave a memorably heated and hectic performance of the Dvořák with the Czech Philharmonic in which many nuances – and notes – were swallowed up. Alban Gerhardt chose Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Aurora Orchestra’s gimmick at Prom 21 was the same as in the last two seasons: playing a major classical symphony from memory. This was touted as an “astonishing feat” by the concert’s on-stage presenter Tom Service but, although unusual, is it really that extraordinary? When I go to the opera I am not moved to congratulate the singers on performing without music. In fact, the lingering on what should be an incidental feature was in danger of obscuring a more interesting point: the excellence of the orchestra’s actual playing.In terms of difficulty, Mozart’s Symphony No 41 was less of a Read more ...
David Nice
Like Prokofiev in his full-length ballet a century later, Berlioz seems to have been inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to bring forth his most compendious score. John Eliot Gardiner, who knows and loves every bar of light and shade in this great Berlioz kaleidoscope, offered even more of it than usual at last night's Prom.As on his unsurpassable recording with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, where they appear as supplements, we also got the second Prologue for semichorus omitted from the final version, orchestrated by Oliver Knussen, and the extra bars of the Latin Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” sang John Cale in the droning voice of Major Tom. Whether the spirit of David Bowie was indeed hovering over the Albert Hall for this impromptu memorial late-night Prom is not easily answered. The shape-shifting Bowie who stayed ahead of the game was honoured in a set lasting nearly two hours and covering 47 years of music-making from 1969 to 2016. But anyone hoping to catch a spacemobile back to 1973 was not to be humoured. Those who turned up with lighting-bolt faces should have been warned: this ain’t rock’n’roll, this is contemporary classical.The set was Read more ...
David Nice
Few 87-year-olds would have the stamina to conduct over 100 minutes of Mahler. Bernard Haitink, though, has always kept a steady, unruffled hand on the interpretative tiller, and if his way with the longest of all the symphonies, the Third, hasn't changed that much since his first recording made half a century ago with his Concertgebouw Orchestra, there's still reassurance in the sheer beauty of the music-making. Not the excitement, mania even, you might expect from younger conductors in the outlandish opening movement, but it's quite something to know at the start that the end, in the form Read more ...
David Nice
The last time I heard Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, it was as European anthem at the end of this May's Europe Day Concert, and everybody gladly stood. That hopeful occasion was distinguished by Andrew Manze's Rameauisation of the melody, stylishly played by Rachel Podger and the European Union Baroque Orchestra. We've been through the mill since then, so last night it was appropriate to hear before it not only the rest of Beethoven's initially turbulent drama in Vladimir Jurowski's typically unusual vision, but also the fraught fanfares of Read more ...
David Nice
It's not often you think you detect a future Brünnhilde in a soprano performing a great Verdi role, but that was the case when American Tamara Wilson made her UK debut last autumn as a stunning Leonora in the ENO production of Verdi's The Force of Destiny. So would she sing the Ring? Not for 10 years at least, she said. But then Mark Wigglesworth, a conductor she knew she could trust as partner, proposed the final scene of Die Walküre at the Proms, and the rest should go down in history.Not that just the last father-daughter confrontation, albeit one of the greatest in all opera, is an Read more ...